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SPLASH 2017
Sun 22 - Fri 27 October 2017 Vancouver, Canada
Fri 27 Oct 2017 10:52 - 11:15 at Regency A - Language Design Chair(s): Gregor Richards

The emergence of energy harvesting devices creates the potential for batteryless sensing and computing devices. Such devices operate only intermittently, as energy is available, presenting a number of challenges for software developers. Programmers face a complex design space requiring reasoning about energy, memory consistency, and forward progress. This paper introduces Alpaca, a low-overhead programming model for intermittent computing on energy-harvesting devices. Alpaca programs are composed of a sequence of user-defined tasks. The Alpaca runtime preserves execution progress at the granularity of a task. The key insight in Alpaca is the privatization of data shared between tasks. Shared values written in a task are detected using idempotence analysis and copied into a buffer private to the task. At the end of the task, modified values from the private buffer are atomically committed to main memory, ensuring that data remain consistent despite power failures. Alpaca provides a familiar programming interface, a highly efficient runtime model, and places fewer restrictions on a target device's hardware architecture. We implemented a prototype of Alpaca as an extension to C with an LLVM compiler pass. We evaluated Alpaca, and directly compared to two systems from prior work. Alpaca eliminates checkpoints, which improves performance up to 15x, and avoids static multi-versioning, which improves memory consumption by up to 5.5x.

Fri 27 Oct

Displayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change

10:30 - 12:00
Language DesignOOPSLA at Regency A
Chair(s): Gregor Richards University of Waterloo
10:30
22m
Talk
Project Snowflake: Non-blocking Safe Manual Memory Management for .NET
OOPSLA
Matthew J. Parkinson Microsoft Research, UK, Dimitrios Vytiniotis Microsoft Research, Cambridge, Kapil Vaswani Microsoft Research, Manuel Costa Microsoft Research, Pantazis Deligiannis Microsoft Research, Dylan McDermott University of Cambridge, Jonathan Balkind Princeton, USA, Aaron Blankstein Princeton, USA
DOI
10:52
22m
Talk
Alpaca: Intermittent Execution without Checkpoints
OOPSLA
Kiwan Maeng Carnegie Mellon University, USA, Alexei Colin Carnegie Mellon University, Brandon Lucia Carnegie Mellon University
DOI
11:15
22m
Talk
An Auditing Language for Preventing Correlated Failures in the Cloud
OOPSLA
Ennan Zhai Yale University, USA, Ruzica Piskac Yale University, Ronghui Gu Columbia University, USA, Xun Lao Yale University, USA, Xi Wang Yale University, USA
DOI
11:37
22m
Talk
Reliable and Automatic Composition of Language Extensions to C
OOPSLA
Ted Kaminski University of Minnesota, Lucas Kramer University of Minnesota, Travis Carlson University of Minnesota, USA, Eric Van Wyk University of Minnesota, USA
DOI Pre-print