Invited talk at Multicore Challenge 2012

In Septemebr 24th, I gave a talk on Debugging Highly-Parallel Programs at the Multicore Challenge Conference 2012.

The conference had over 120 participants and was broadcasted via Internet, which allowed a few more dozens to participate remotely. More tham 80% of the participants were from the (semi-conductor and) IT Industry.

Abstract:

The new multicore architectures came to stay! And to make the most out of these architectures, software developers must now embrace multi-threading and parallel programming. But parallel programming is some orders of magnitude harder than sequential programming, making the program design and coding more demanding. The exponential set of program states makes code coverage and proper program testing more difficult and time-consuming. The non-determinism and interference among concurrent threads makes debugging a nightmare. In this talk, I will explain why developing, testing and debugging parallel programming is so much harder, and will identify some challenges brought by the upcoming many-core processors.