Tech Talk: A Scalable I/O Manager for GHC

January 20th, 2010 by Iavor S. Diatchki

The talk will be presented by Johan Tibell on Friday, January 29th, at 1:30pm.

Slides are available (also on Slideshare and  Scribd).

Abstract: The Glasgow Haskell Compiler supports extraordinarily cheap threads. These are implemented using a two-level model, with threads scheduled across a set of OS-level threads. Since the lightweight threads can’t afford to block when performing I/O operations, when a Haskell program starts, it runs an I/O manager thread whose job is to notify other threads when they can safely perform I/O.

The I/O manager manages its file descriptors using the select system call. While select performs well for a small number of file descriptors, it doesn’t scale to a large number of concurrent clients, making GHC less attractive for use in large-scale server development.

This talk will describe a new, more scalable I/O manager that’s currently under development and that hopefully will replace the current I/O manager in a future release of GHC.

Details:

• Date: January 29th, 2010, Friday
• Time: 1:30pm
• Location: Galois Inc.,  421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300 (3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)

Bio: Johan Tibell is a Software Engineer at Google Inc. He received a M.S. in Software Engineering from the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, in 2007.

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Galois has been holding weekly technical seminars for several years on topics from functional programming, formal methods, compiler and language design, to cryptography, and operating system construction, with talks by many figures from the programming language and formal methods communities. The talks are open and free. An RSVP is not required, but feel free to contact the organizer with questions and comments.

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