A Comparison of Message-passing and Implicit Parallel Programming in the Servo Browser Engine

Date

Oct 23, 2017

Time

3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Speaker

Felix Wittwer

Affiliation

Institut für Technische Informatik, Professur Compilerbau

Language

en

Main Topic

Informatik

Other Topics

Informatik

Description

Since the evolution of single-core processors stalled after hitting the power wall, parallel programming becomes more and more important. In order to achieve faster program execution, developers have to harness the multiprocessor architectures of modern CPUs. Message-passing is a very popular way to write parallel programs which can also become rather challenging with growing application complexity. Other approaches like implicit parallelism are often neglected as they are not very popular and harder to understand, due to their often very functional syntax. This thesis tried to provide an unbiased comparison between the concepts of message-passing and implicit parallelism. In order to be able to compare these concepts, we translated parts of the Servo browser engine from message-passing Rust code into implicit parallel Ohua code. As a web browser is a large application, we additionally provided a tool that statically analyzes message-passing code in order to help us in the translation process. To compare both concepts, we also proposed a Rust-like syntax for Ohua, which was used to write the translated Servo code. We concluded from our research that Servo code written in Ohua is indeed more concise and easier to read and maintain than the original code. Still, future work needs to tackle a number of problems that became apparent as we tried to port Servo's functionality to Ohua. Diese Veranstaltung wird unterstützt von Professur Compilerbau.

Last modified: Oct 23, 2017, 9:57:31 AM