Heinz Kabutz

(2400) The Secrets of Concurrency

Technical long talk 50 min

Thursday, 2008-06-26, 12:00 - 12:50, Arena 8

Heinz Kabutz - The Java Specialists' Newsletter (speaker)

Topics

• Software engineering lifecycle
• Java Development Kit & Runtime Environment and its development
• Real-world experiences and show cases

Download the presentation

Abstract

The clock speeds of CPUs have stopped increasing at the exponential rate they 
were doing since the formulation of Moore's law.  In order to boost performance 
of complicated algorithms, we must harness the power of the multi-cores that are 
available to us nowadays.  However, due to the way in which Java was specified, 
it is easy to make serious errors in multi-threaded code, thus leading to bugs 
that are sometimes impossible to find.

In this presentation, we will talk about ten laws that we have used to remember 
the intricacies of threading:

   1. The Law of the Sabotaged Doorbell
   2. The Law of the Distracted Spearfisherman
   3. The Law of the Overstocked Haberdashery
   4. The Law of the Blind Spot
   5. The Law of the Leaked Memo
   6. The Law of the Corrupt Politician
   7. The Law of the Micromanager
   8. The Law of Cretan Driving
   9. The Law of Sudden Riches
  10. The Law of the Uneaten Spinach

As an example, the Law of the Leaked Memo deals with compiler optimizations that 
may (or may not) result in a thread viewing information before it should be 
logically available.  In the Law of Sudden Riches, we deal with the problem of 
throwing new faster hardware at an existing problem.

For a preview of some of the laws, please refer to 
http://www.javaspecialists.eu/archive/newsletters.jsp?category=Concurrency