Beyond the embarrassingly parallel – New languages, compilers, and runtimes for big-data processing
Large-scale data processing requires large-scale parallelism. Data-processing systems from traditional databases to Hadoop and Spark rely on embarrassingly-parallel relational primitives (e.g. map, reduce, filter, and join) to extract parallelism from input programs. But many important applications, such as machine learning and log processing, iterate over large data sets with true loop-carried dependences across iterations. As such, these applications are not readily parallelizable in current data-processing systems.
In this talk, I will challenge the premise that parallelism requires independent computations. In particular, I will describe a general methodology for extracting parallelism from dependent computations. The basic idea is replace dependences with symbolic unknowns and execute the dependent computations symbolically in parallel. The challenge of parallelization now becomes a, hopefully mechanizable, task of performing the resulting symbolic execution efficiently. This methodology opens up the possibility of designing new languages for data-processing computations, compilers that automatically parallelize such computations, and runtimes that exploit the additional parallelism. I will describe our initial successes with this approach and the research challenges that lie ahead.
Biography
Madan Musuvathi is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research working in the intersection of programming languages and systems, with specific focus on concurrency and parallelism. His interests span program analysis, systems, model checking, verification, and theorem proving. His research has led to several tools that improve the lives of software developers both at Microsoft and at other companies. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004.