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Summer School – Big Data Information Visualisation

SACHI the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group and the Big Data Lab St Andrews are pleased to announce they will jointly run a SICSA supported “Big Data Information Visualisation” summer school in 2013. This summer school is concerned with the processing, management and hence presentation of “big data”, in an intelligible form with information visualisation techniques and methods. Data-intensive researchers talk about the “three Vs” of Big Data: Volume, Velocity and Variety (see CACM post). In this summer school we aim to demystify the concept of big data by introducing a systematic, scientific and rigorous approach to tackling it. We take a blended theory and practice approach here, by providing both theoretical underpinnings and practical use of the infrastructure to process big-data and the means to understand it with information visualisation.

See the SACHI website for more details.

Event details

  • When: 8th July 2013 - 12th July 2013
  • Format: Summer School

Talk by Susmit Sarkar

Title: “Shared-Memory Concurrency in the Real World: Working with Relaxed Memory Consistency”

Abstract:

Shared-memory concurrency is now mainstream, from phones to servers. However, real-world implementations do not validate the basic assumption of Sequential Consistency traditionally made in work on concurrent programming and verification. Instead, we get subtle relaxed consistency models. Furthermore, the consistency models of different hardware architectures vary widely and have often been poorly defined, while programming language models (aiming to abstract from hardware details) are different again.

This talk is about what relaxed consistency models we actually get on current mainstream systems: the x86 multiprocessor architecture, the IBM Power and ARM lines of multiprocessors, and in the new concurrency model in ISO C/C++11. Part of the challenge here is that neither hardware microarchitects nor low-level programmers (for operating systems or compilers) know exactly what you get, or what you should get. I will discuss the models that are getting some agreement/acceptance, and how we can use those models.

Event details

  • When: 4th April 2013 12:00 - 13:00
  • Where: Cole 1.04
  • Format: Talk