Georgios Chatzopoulos, a student from EPFL’s Distributed Programming Laboratory, received the Best Paper Award at the 17th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference in Italy in December 2016.

The winning paper, “Locking Made Easy”, presents GLS, a middleware designed to simplify and increase the efficiency of lock-based programming, which protects shared data from concurrent accesses.

GLS is based on the generic lock algorithm GLK. It offers debugging options for detecting various lock-related issues such as deadlocks. Rachid’s team evaluated GLS and GLK on two modern hardware platforms, using several software systems. They demonstrated how GLK improves performances of the systems by an average 23% compared to their default locking strategies.