Concurrency for the application programmer

Abstract

Forced by architectural and commercial considerations, programmers now have to confront multi-core systems, heterogeneity, clusters, clouds. What does this revolution mean for the application programmer, typically removed from the hardware through many layers of middle-ware (often on top of managed run-time environments)? How should the capabilities of heterogeneous processors (including GPUs, FPGAs, streaming processors) and heterogeneous memory (including non-coherent memory) be made available to the application programmer? Should abstractions for the application programmer focus primarily on application-level concurrency rather than implementation-level concurrency? Should application-level concurrency abstractions be fundamentally determinate? Fundamentally declarative? Resilient in the face of node- and network-failure? How can high-performance concurrent programs be written in garbage-collected languages? How can they not be written in garbage-collected languages? This workshop aims to bring together practitioners and thinkers to address all topics around concurrency for the application programmer.