What is RiSE doing in that area?
Schulte: With multicore machines, most of our programs are parallel. Today, we need a way to express parallelism, and we need analysis tools to find errors related to concurrency. To give .NET programmers a much more reliable way to program multi-core machines, Daan Leijen recently developed a library of high level concurrency abstractions, called the Task Parallel Library (TPL), which will ship as part of the Parallel Extensions to .NET in .NET 4.0. Now that we can express parallelism, we need to have analysis tools to make sure there are no races, deadlocks, or performance bottlenecks. To address some of these problems, Madan Musuvathi and Shaz Qadeer have developed CHESS, which uncovers data races by controlling the scheduler for the different threads in a program. But in the long run, our existing concurrency models of programming, with threads and locks, are not adequate. If you think about the way that our abstractions have evolved, we started with assembly language, we went to C
