@inproceedings{mars11hipeac,
  author =    {Jason Mars and Lingjia Tang and Mary Lou Soffa},
  title =     {Directly Characterizing Cross Core Interference Through Contention Synthesis},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers (HiPEAC 2011)},
  year =      {2011},
  month =     {January},
  keys =      {http://www.hipeac.net/conference}
}

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/google-phd-fellowships-go-international.html

“Barbara Bush, the 28-year-old daughter of President George W. Bush, told Fox News on Sunday that she was “glad” the Democrats’ health care reform package passed, and declared that “health care should be a right for everyone.”

It’s a position that suggests she would be willing to go much farther in reforming health care than the law passed earlier this year.

“What do you think of Obama health care reform?” Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked.

“That is a good question. Obviously, the health care reform bill was highly debated by a lot of people and I guess, I’m glad that, you know, a bill was passed,” replied Bush.” -rawstory

gata love it!

The same commandos who launched a nighttime assault on aid ships bound for Gaza will also try and stop the Irish aid ship Rachel Corrie.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear late Thursday that the ship will not be allowed into Gaza but will be boarded and brought to an Israeli port.

Israeli navy sources told the Jerusalem Post that the operation would be carried out by commandos from Flotilla 13 –several of whom took part in their earlier engagement at sea that left nine aid workers dead, including one American citizen, who was shot four times in the head.

The plan is to board the Rachel Corrie, the newspaper says. -irishcentral

After the killing of the 9 aid workers delivering food to the needy, this is just going to far.

“Nothing sucks more than being on stage in front of a bunch of techies and having your demo crash on you twice. Actually, the only way that sucks more is if you’re Adobe and it’s Flash that’s crashing on a mobile device, forcing folks to wonder if Steve Jobs was right about the stability of Flash.” -zdnet

how does this happen like really, did they not prepare or were they over confident. theres no excuse for this.

copyright © 2010 jason mars

“Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.” -apple

steve jobs releases and official statement on apple vs flash. omg, this is soo juicy! go steve!

“Palm Inc. a pioneer in the smart phone business that couldn’t quite make the comeback it needed, has agreed to be bought out by Hewlett-Packard Co. for about $1.4 billion in cash.

The two Silicon Valley companies announced Wednesday that the deal will see HP pay $5.70 for every Palm common share and certain preferred shares. Palm had closed trading Wednesday at $4.63 but traded as high as $18.09 in the past 52 weeks.” -msnbc

i wonder what hp has up its sleeve?

Research insight: Contention for shared resources is severely limiting our ability to realize the promised parallelism of multicore architectures.

The goals: of this research direction is to fully understand the nature of contention as it occurs in current commodity multicore processors, and to exploit this understanding to devise innovative approaches and mechanisms for mitigating the negative impact of this contention in current commodity multicore processors. This negative impact has implications in system performance, utilization, throughput, quality of service, etc.

Impact: Making significant progress in this direction will enable the continuation of Moore’s law via allocating transistors to implement higher degrees of parallel processing. (At the very least for multi-programmed workloads)

My related publications:

1. “Directly Characterizing Cross Core Interference Through Contention Synthesis” at HiPEAC 2011
2. “Contention Aware Execution: Online Contention Detection and Response” at CGO 2010
3. “Synthesizing Contention” at WBIA 2009 (workshop @ MICRO 2009)

Research insight: The ‘rewriting’ doesn’t have to occur dynamically to enable dynamic restructuring. When not identify the dynamic situations you wish to accommodate and statical specialize a number of instances (or versions) of the application code of interest for a number of these dynamic situations. Then online we simple need to identify which situation (or scenario) we are in and switch instances accordingly.

The goals: We must understand the implications of specializing at varying granularities to understand their trade-offs. We must also demonstrate the unique capabilities of this “scenario based optimization” (SBO) and its practical applications.

Impact: I expect SBO to one day be a commonly used optimization technique. The only challenge currently is the lack of a standardized semantic for performance monitoring hardware and its ABI (application binary interface) and how it is to be interfaced by each layer of the software stack. As our community further establishes these semantics SBO can be easily adopted in numerous application domains.

My related publications:

1. “Scenario Based Optimization: A Framework for Statically Enabling Online Optimizations” at CGO 2009

“Chambers also made comments suggesting that Apple’s closed system was restrictive to developers — an allegation that caught the ire of Apple.

“Someone has it backwards — it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe’s Flash is closed and proprietary,” Apple’s Miller said in the statement.

While Apple’s stance should come as no surprise, the fact that it offered comment on the matter is unique for the notoriously secretive company. When Apple introduced iPhone OS 4 earlier this month, company co-founder Steve Jobs was asked if there were any plans to add support for Adobe Flash. Jobs simply responded, ‘No.’” -appleinsider

i’m sorry, but i am in total agreement with apple on this one. i’m in total support of html5 and other open standards.

Research insight: A new microarchitecural environment is emerging, and traditional online binary optimization techniques may no longer be relevant. In this new environment we have sophisticated multicore capabilities and lightweight hardware performance monitoring capabilities, and by leveraging these capabilities intelligently the cost of online monitoring and analysis begins to melt away.

The goals: Demonstrate the opportunity of unobtrusively perform sophisticated and much more beneficial online analyses for dynamic optimizations.

Impact: Successfully showing that reduction in complexity of harnessing binary level online optimization and demonstrating the benefits of leveraging the latest microarchitectural advances to re-approach online optimization problems should lead to evidence of the commercial and practical viability of online optimization for native application binaries.

My related publications:

1. “A Reactive Unobtrusive Prefetcher for Multicore and Manycore Architectures” at SHCMP 2008 (workshop @ ISCA 2008)
2. “MATS: Multicore Adaptive Trace Selection” at STMCS 2008 (workshop @ CGO 2008)

“Scientists are showing off some of the 123 new species they’ve found in the remote forests of Borneo, three years after the three nations that own pieces of the island agreed to safeguard 85,000 square miles (220,000 square kilometers) in the “Heart of Borneo.”

The species, including a flying frog that changes color and a slug that shoots “love darts,” are detailed in a report from the global conservation group WWF, celebrating Earth Day as well as the success of the Heart of Borneo preservation effort. The leaders of Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia signed onto a pledge in 2007 that called for species protection as well as sustainable development of the rainforest region.

The Heart of Borneo boasts scores of animal species, hundreds of bird species and thousands of types of plants that are found nowhere else in the world. A century and a half ago, evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin called the island “one great luxuriant hothouse made by nature for herself.” -msnbc

why does this kind of stuff always get me excited. discovering new species is just to similar to discovering aliens exist.

Achieving effective online adaptation for natively executed applications has proved quite challenging [6, 34, 45, 4] and to date has not been widely adopted. Traditionally, at the binary level, a run-time layer is added that virtualizes the execution of the application by performing dynamic binary to binary translation, injecting trampolines and instrumentation into the translated code to maintain control of the application. This approach often adds high overhead and complexity to the application [33, 45, 17, 34], discouraging its use and adoption in industry and for commercial applications. We propose a new paradigm for online adaptation. We propose a lightweight approach to online adaptation that leverages current microarchitectural advances to efficiently enable online monitoring and adaptation without the complexity of binary translation or fine-grain instrumentation. Our proposed methodology takes advantage of the ubiquitous hardware performance monitors [13, 44, 3] present in modern chip micro-architectures to dynamically monitor the micro-architectural events of a chip and application behavior with negligible overhead. By leveraging these capabilities to develop an innovative lightweight online adaptation framework (Loaf) we will be able to address a number of important real-world online adaptation problems.

This proposal argues for application flexibility and ability to adapt itself to its environment or to adapt its environment to itself. We propose a mechanism to enable this, and show how it is to be applied to a number of problems in computing.

ph.d thesis proposal (pdf)

committee:

• Mary Lou Soffa (advisor)
• Kim Hazelwood (chair)
• Jack Davidson
• David August
• John Lach

-doghousediaries

i wonder what happened to wave, i guess ill find out this summer.