Annual Conference: Communicating Process Architectures
Communicating Process Architectures 2018,
the 40th. WoTUG conference on concurrent and parallel systems, takes place from
Sunday August 19th. to Wednesday August 22nd. 2018 and is hosted by
Professor Dr. Rainer Spallek,
Chair of
VLSI Design, Diagnostics and Architecture
at the Faculty of Computer Science,
Technische Universität Dresden, Germany.
The conference is organised by Dr. Spallek in collboration with Oliver Knodel and Uwe Mielke
and in partnership with WoTUG.
About WoTUG
WoTUG provides a forum for the discussion and promotion of concurrency ideas,
tools and products in computer science.
It organises specialist workshops and annual conferences that address
key concurrency issues at all levels of software and hardware granularity.
WoTUG aims to progress the leading state of the art in:
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theory (programming models, process algebra, semantics, ...);
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practice (multicore processors and run-times, clusters, clouds, libraries, languages, verification, model checking, ...);
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education (at school, undergraduate and postgraduate levels, ...);
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applications (complex systems, modelling, supercomputing, embedded systems, robotics, games, e-commerce, ...);
and to stimulate discussion and ideas on the roles concurrency will play in the future:
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for the next generation of scalable computer infrastructure (hard and soft) and application,
where scaling means the ability to ramp up functionality (stay in control as complexity increases)
as well as physical metrics (such as absolute performance and response times);
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for system integrity (dependability, security, safety, liveness, ...);
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for making things simple.
Of course, neither of the above sets of bullets are exclusive.
WoTUG publications
A database of papers and presentations from WoTUG conferences is here.
The Abstract below has been randomly selected from this database.
Higher Levels of Process Synchronisation
By Peter H. Welch, David C. Wood
Four new synchronisation primitives (SEMAPHOREs, RESOURCEs, EVENTs and BUCKETs) were introduced in the KRoC 0.8beta release of occam for SPARC (SunOS/Solaris) and Alpha (OSF/1) UNIX workstations. This paper reports on the rationale, application and implementation of two of these (SEMAPHOREs and EVENTs). Details on the other two may be found on the web. The new primitives are designed to support higher-level mechanisms of SHARING between parallel processes and give us greater powers of expression. They will also let greater levels of concurrency be safely exploited from future parallel architectures, such as those providing (virtual) shared-memory. They demonstrate that occam is neutral in any debate between the merits of message-passing versus shared-memory parallelism, enabling applications to take advantage of whichever paradigm (or mixture of paradigms) is the most appropriate. The new primitives could be (but are not) implemented in terms of traditional channels, but only at the expense of increased complexity and computational overhead. The primitives are immediately useful even for uni-processors -- for example, the cost of a fair ALT can be reduced from O(n) to O(1). In fact, all the operations associated with new primitives have constant space and time complexities; and the constants are very low. The KRoC release provides an Abstract Data Type interface to the primitives. However, direct use of such mechanisms still allows the user to misuse them. They must be used in the ways prescribed below else else their semantics become unpredictable. No tool is provided to check correct usage at this level. The intention is to bind those primitives found to be useful into higher level versions of occam. Some of the primitives (e.g. SEMAPHOREs) may never themselves be made visible in the language, but may be used to implement bindings of higher-level paradigms (such as SHARED channels and BLACKBOARDs). The compiler will perform the relevant usage checking on all new language bindings, closing the security loopholes opened by raw use of the primitives. The paper closes by relating this work with the notions of virtual transputers, microcoded schedulers, object orientation and Java threads.
Complete record...
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