Kevin Hoffman, Ribbons, A Partially-Shared Memory Programming Model

We present ribbons, a shared memory programming modelthat allows for more implicit sharing of memory than processes but ismore restrictive than threads. Ribbons structure the heap into protectiondomains. Privileges between these protection domains are carefullycontrolled to provide the ability to fully or partially "sandbox" certainportions of a program's computation. RibbonJ, a backwards-compatibleextension of Java, is defined to easily create programs that leverage theribbons model. RibbonJ is implemented within Jikes RVM, and avoidsthe overhead of inline security checks and read or write barriers byleveraging the memory protection mechanisms already supported inmodern hardware and operating systems. This is joint work withHarrison Metzger and Professor Patrick Eugster. About the speaker: Kevin Hoffman is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at Purdue, advised by Professor Patrick Eugster.He has published papers on topics ranging from reputation systems,aspect-oriented programming, and software metrics, to automatedregression-cause determination via dynamic software analysis.He is currently working on the Ribbon project, as well as onscalable, low-latency, low-contention garbage collection techniquesfor high core count systems.