KAIST Concurrency and Parallelism

We design and verify innovative concurrent and parallel systems.

The concurrency and parallelism laboratory is shut down. After 6.5 beautiful years at KAIST, Jeehoon moved to FuriosaAI Research to search for the “right” abstractions for AI accelerators.

Projects

In today’s AI-driven world, the demand for computing resources is rapidly increasing. However, these resources are becoming scarce due to the slowing of Dennard scaling and Moore’s law. To address this shortage, massive parallelization of computing resources is the most viable solution, helping to offset the impact of this slowdown.

We were searching for the “right” abstraction for such massively parallel systems. These systems, ranging from microarchitectures to programming languages and algorithms, aim to significantly enhance performance and reduce power consumption compared to conventional systems.

To achieve this goal, we aimed to gain a holistic understanding of entire computer systems in order to:

  1. Design abstraction layers that harness the intrinsic parallelism of workloads while offering an easy programming environment.
  2. Verify these abstraction layers to ensure their correctness.

  • Designing concurrent and parallel systems: Developing efficient yet safe concurrent software and hardware is challenging. Efficient systems must support concurrent accesses by multiple threads or components, which complicates safety considerations.

    Therefore, we were developing design principles for managing concurrent accesses and creating practical concurrent systems based on these principles. Our current projects include:

  • Verifying concurrent and parallel systems: Ensuring the safety of concurrent software and hardware through testing alone is challenging due to the inherent non-determinism from scheduling, optimization, and other factors.

    Thus, we were developing verification techniques to prove the correctness of concurrent systems and verify real-world systems like operating systems, database systems, or cache coherence protocols. This helps us explore whether verification is more cost-effective than testing for concurrent systems. Our verification projects include:

Publications

  • (SOSP 2025) Scalable Address Spaces using Concurrent Interval Skiplist.
    Taewoo Kim, Youngjin Kwon, Jeehoon Kang.
    Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (accepted).
    ​ ​ ​
  • (Ph.D. Dissertation 2025) Design and Verification of Concurrent Memory Reclamation Algorithms.
    Jaehwang Jung.
    School of Computing, KAIST (Outstanding PhD Thesis Award).
    [paper: local] ​ ​ [website] ​
  • (ASPLOS 2023) ShakeFlow: Functional Hardware Description with Latency-Insensitive Interface Combinators.
    Sungsoo Han†, Minseong Jang†, Jeehoon Kang (†: co-first authors in alphabetical order).
    The International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems.
    [paper: doi, local] ​ [artifact: development] ​ [website] ​
  • (Ph.D. Dissertation 2019) Reconciling low-level features of C with compiler optimizations.
    Jeehoon Kang.
    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Korea.
    [paper: handle, local] ​ ​ [website] ​

People

Jeehoon Kang
Principal Investigator
Shuangshuang Zhao
Ph.D. Student
Seungmin Jeon
Ph.D. Student
Janggun Lee
Ph.D. Student
Minseong Jang
Ph.D. Student
Jung In Rhee
Ph.D. Student
Haechan An
M.S. Student
Woojin Lee
M.S. Student
Taewoo Kim
M.S. Student
Sunho Park
M.S. Student
Jaewoo Kim
M.S. Student
Jeonghyeon Kim
M.S. Student
Gieun Jeong
M.S. Student
Jonguk Jeon
M.S. Student
Subeen Park
M.S. Student
Kyungsoo Lee
M.S. Student
Khongor Damdinbayar
B.S. Student
Jaewon Jeong
B.S. Student


Alumni

Kyeongmin Cho, Ph.D.
(first affiliation: Rebellions)
Jaehwang Jung, Ph.D.
(first affiliation: Rebellions)
Jaemin Choi, M.S.
(first affiliation: FuriosaAI)
Chunmyong Park, M.S.
(first affiliation: Supertone)
Sungsoo Han, M.S.
(first affiliation: FuriosaAI)
Sunghwan Shim, M.S.
(first affiliation: FuriosaAI)
Sunghyuk Kay, M.S.
(first affiliation: LG Electronics)
Yeji Han, B.S.
(first affiliation: Software Foundations Laboratory, SNU)
Doehyun Baek, B.S.
(first affiliation: Programming Language Research Group, KAIST)
Jungwoo Kim, B.S.
(first affiliation: Computer Architecture and Systems Laboratory, KAIST)
Jeho Yeon, B.S. Student
(first affiliation: SHIFT UP Corporation)


Lectures

Contact

  • :office: Place:
         Rm. 4433 (Jeehoon) and Rm. 4441 (students), Bldg. E3-1
         School of Computing, KAIST
         291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu
         Daejeon 34141, Korea
  • :phone: Phone:
         +82-42-350-3578 (Jeehoon)
         +82-42-350-7878 (Students)
  • :speaking_head: Comments: