Because of hardware TM limitations, software fallbacks are the only way to make TM algorithms guarantee progress. Nevertheless, all known software fallbacks to date, from simple locks to sophisticated versions of the NOrec Hybrid TM algorithm, have ...

There have been several recent efforts to improve the performance of fences. The most aggressive designs allow post-fence accesses to retire and complete before the fence completes. Unfortunately, such designs present implementation difficulties due to ...

Phase Change Memory (PCM) is an emerging Non Volatile Memory (NVM) technology that has the potential to provide scalable high-density memory systems. While the non-volatility of PCM is a desirable property in order to save leakage power, it also has the ...

This paper presents a new, co-designed compiler and architecture called GhostRider for supporting privacy preserving computation in the cloud. GhostRider ensures all programs satisfy a property called memory-trace obliviousness (MTO): Even an adversary ...

Optimized hardware for propagating and checking software-programmable metadata tags can achieve low runtime overhead. We generalize prior work on hardware tagging by considering a generic architecture that supports software-defined policies over ...

This paper presents PARD, a programmable architecture for resourcing-on-demand that provides a new programming interface to convey an application's high-level information like quality-of-service requirements to the hardware. PARD enables new ...

Despite its benefits, free cooling may expose servers to high absolute temperatures, wide temperature variations, and high humidity when datacenters are sited at certain locations. Prior research (in non-free-cooled datacenters) has shown that high ...

Molecular-scale Network-on-Chip (mNoC) crossbars use quantum dot LEDs as an on-chip light source, and chromophores to provide optical signal filtering for receivers. An mNoC reduces power consumption or enables scaling to larger crossbars for a reduced ...

Cyber-physical systems are integrations of computation, communication networks, and physical dynamics. Although time plays a central role in the physical world, all widely used software abstractions lack temporal semantics. The notion of correct ...

This paper introduces a temporally bounded total store ordering (TBTSO) memory model, and shows that it enables nonblocking fence-free solutions to asymmetric synchronization problems, such as those arising in memory reclamation and biased locking.

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We propose a new memory-safe interpretation of the C abstract machine that provides stronger protection to benefit security and debugging. Despite ambiguities in the specification intended to provide implementation flexibility, contemporary ...

Processor implementation errata remain a problem, and worse, a subset of these bugs are security-critical. We classified 7 years of errata from recent commercial processors to understand the magnitude and severity of this problem, and found that of 301 ...

Current shared-memory hardware is complex and inefficient. Prior work on the DeNovo coherence protocol showed that disciplined shared-memory programming models can enable more complexity-, performance-, and energy-efficient hardware than the state-of-...

As semiconductor technology scales towards ever-smaller transistor sizes, hardware fault rates are increasing. Since important application classes (e.g., multimedia, streaming workloads) are data-error-tolerant, recent research has proposed techniques ...

We propose and evaluate a framework for creating and running approximation-enabled MapReduce programs. Specifically, we propose approximation mechanisms that fit naturally into the MapReduce paradigm, including input data sampling, task dropping, and ...

Heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) and OpenCL define scoped synchronization to facilitate low overhead communication across a subset of threads. Scoped synchronization works well for static sharing patterns, where consumer threads are known a ...

Bare-metal clouds are an emerging infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that leases physical machines (bare-metal instances) rather than virtual machines, allowing resource-intensive applications to have exclusive access to physical hardware. Unfortunately,...

As user demand scales for intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) such as Apple's Siri, Google's Google Now, and Microsoft's Cortana, we are approaching the computational limits of current datacenter architectures. It is an open question how future ...