Abstract
In an abstract sense, CPUs have changed very little over the past couple of decades -- in many cases, 20-year-old binaries will run on new machines. However, the performance characteristics of computers systems has changed dramatically over this period of time, particularly for SMP operating-system kernels such as Linux. This talk will summarize some of these changes, and will give an overview of how a recent synchronization mechanism, namely RCU ("read-copy update") has greatly improved performance of algorithms involving read-mostly data structures in the Linux kernel.
Biography
Paul E. McKenney is a Distinguished Engineer at the Linux Technology Center at IBM Beaverton. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Oregon Health and Sciences Univerity. His research interests are in the intersection of SMP performance and scalability and realtime response. He has authored more than 20 research papers in SMP algorithms, communications congestion control algorithms, realtime response, and synchronization primitives. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and has been invited to the Linux Kernel Summit three times (2003-2005). He is a co-inventor of RCU, but given that something resembling RCU has been invented independently at least five times, this might not count for all that much. He holds 19 patents.
His hobbies include running and the usual house-wife-and-kids habit.