UT ECE professor Vijay Garg has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for his work on developing new synchronization mechanisms for concurrent programs. The project aims to develop new synchronization mechanisms with the goal to make synchronization as simple and intuitive as possible for programmers.

All current monitor based synchronization mechanisms require programmers to explicitly signal threads that may be waiting on certain conditions. In the proposed synchronization mechanism, there is no notion of condition variables and it is the responsibility of the runtime system to automatically signal appropriate threads. Analogous to automatic garbage collection in Java, this project is designing efficient algorithms and techniques for automatic signaling. Wei-Lun Hung, a Ph.D. student under Prof. Garg's supervision, recently presented a paper at PLDI'2013 that describes AutoSynch, a prototype system in Java for automatic signaling.