e already knew the players—MgcRacGAP, Aurora B, and RhoA—and that knocking out any one of them caused failure of cytokinesis; but it wasn’t clear how they were connected. Now, it appears that Aurora B phosphorylates the GAP domain of MgcRacGAP, allowing it to turn its GAP activity toward RhoA, according to data from Yukinori Minoshima, Toshiyuki Kawashima, Toshio Kitamura (University of Tokyo, ...

A number of prior research efforts have investigated thread scheduling mechanisms to enable better reuse of data in a processor’s cache. We propose to exploit the locality of the critical section data by enforcing an affinity between locks and the processor that has cached the execution state of the critical section protected by that lock. We investigate the idea of migrating threads to the “lo...

The paper studies the impact of several lock manager designs on the overhead imposed to a persistent programming language by automated object locking. Our study reveals that a lock management method based on lock state sharing outperforms more traditional lock management designs. Lock state sharing is a novel lock management method that represents all lock data structures with equal values with...

Reader-writer synchronization relaxes the constraints of mutual exclusion to permit more than one process to inspect a shared object concurrently, as long as none of them changes its value. On uniprocessors, mutual exclusion and readerwriter locks are typically designed to de-schedule blocked processes; however, on shared-memory multiprocessors it is often advantageous to have processes busy wa...

In many installations, traditional locks have been replaced with new type of locks, which do not rely on mechanical security for guarding the doors. Mechanical locks hold several weaknesses, which are due to bad mechanical engineering, tolerances within cylinders, small number of different combinations etc. As the entry cost is small and learning curve for obtaining basic skills is steep, then ...

The problem of Pairwise CFL-reachability is to decide whether two given program locations in different threads are simultaneously reachable in the presence of recursion in threads and scheduling constraints imposed by synchronization primitives. Pairwise CFL-reachability is the core problem underlying concurrent program analysis especially dataflow analysis. Unfortunately, it is undecidable eve...

Locks are a natural place for improving the energy efficiency of software systems. First, concurrent systems are mainstream and when their threads synchronize, they typically do it with locks. Second, locks are well-defined abstractions, hence changing the algorithm implementing them can be achieved without modifying the system. Third, some locking strategies consume more power than others, thu...

As the primary choice for aero-engine turbine blades, creep resistance is an important mechanical property developing third-generation single crystal Ni-based superalloys. The behavior of superalloy in [001] orientation was studied at 980 °C under a series stress levels, accompanied with scanning electron microscope (SEM) and transmission (TEM) observation to investigate microstructure deformat...

This paper addresses the problem of cache consistency in a client-server database environment. We assume the server provides shared database access for multiple client workstations and that client workstations may cache a portion of the database. Our primary goal is to investigate techniques to maintain the consistency of the client cache and to improve server throughput. We propose a new cache...

Synchronization primitives for large scale multiprocessors need to provide low latency and low contention to achieve good performance. Queue-based locks (implemented in software with fetch and instructions) can greatly reduce contention and improve overall performance by arranging for processors to spin only on local locations. Unfortunately, queued locks exhibit poor behavior in the presence o...