994 research outputs found
On universality of concurrent expressions with synchronization primitives
AbstractConcurrent expressions are a class of extended regular expressions with a shuffle operator (â) and its closure (). The class of concurrent expressions with synchronization primitives, called synchronized concurrent expressions, is introduced as an extended model of Shaw's flow expressions. This paper discusses some formal properties of synchronized concurrent expressions from a formal language theoretic point of view. It is shown that synchronized concurrent expressions with three signal/wait operations are universal in the sense that they can simulate any semaphore controlled concurrent expressions and they can describe the class of recursively enumerable sets. Some results on semaphore controlled regular expressions are also included to give a taste of more positive results
Higher levels of process synchronisation
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 [1][2][3]. 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 [4]. 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 (in this paper and in [4]) 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
A Machine-Independent port of the MPD language run time system to NetBSD
SR (synchronizing resources) is a PASCAL - style language enhanced with
constructs for concurrent programming developed at the University of Arizona in
the late 1980s. MPD (presented in Gregory Andrews' book about Foundations of
Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming) is its successor,
providing the same language primitives with a different, more C-style, syntax.
The run-time system (in theory, identical, but not designed for sharing) of
those languages provides the illusion of a multiprocessor machine on a single
Unix-like system or a (local area) network of Unix-like machines.
Chair V of the Computer Science Department of the University of Bonn is
operating a laboratory for a practical course in parallel programming
consisting of computing nodes running NetBSD/arm, normally used via PVM, MPI
etc.
We are considering to offer SR and MPD for this, too. As the original
language distributions were only targeted at a few commercial Unix systems,
some porting effort is needed. However, some of the porting effort of our
earlier SR port should be reusable.
The integrated POSIX threads support of NetBSD-2.0 and later allows us to use
library primitives provided for NetBSD's phtread system to implement the
primitives needed by the SR run-time system, thus implementing 13 target CPUs
at once and automatically making use of SMP on VAX, Alpha, PowerPC, Sparc,
32-bit Intel and 64 bit AMD CPUs.
We'll present some methods used for the impementation and compare some
performance values to the traditional implementation.Comment: 6 page
A comprehensive approach in performance evaluation for modernreal-time operating systems
In real-time computing the accurate characterization of the performance and determinism that a particular real-time operating system/hardware combination can provide for real-time applications is essential. This issue is not properly addressed by existing performance metrics mainly due to the lack of completeness and generalization. In this paper we present a set of comprehensive, easy-to-implement and useful metrics covering three basic real-time operating system features: response to external events, intertask synchronization and resource sharing, and intertask data transferring. The evaluation of real-time operating systems using a set of fine-grained metrics is fundamental to guarantee that we can reach the required determinism in real-world applications.Publicad
CAN Fieldbus Communication in the CSP-based CT Library
In closed-loop control systems several realworld entities are simultaneously communicated to through a multitude of spatially distributed sensors and actuators. This intrinsic parallelism and complexity motivates implementing control software in the form of concurrent processes deployed on distributed hardware architectures. A CSP based occam-like architecture seems to be the most convenient for such a purpose. Many, often conflicting, requirements make design and implementation of distributed real-time control systems an extremely difficult task. The scope of this paper is limited to achieving safe and real-time communication over a CAN fieldbus for an\ud
existing CSP-based framework
Process Management in Distributed Operating Systems
As part of designing and building the Amoeba distributed operating system, we have come up with a simple set of mechanisms for process management that allows downloading process migration, checkpointing, remote debugging and emulation of alien operating system interfaces.\ud
The basic process management facilities are realized by the Amoeba Kernel and can be augmented by user-space services: Debug Service, Load-Balancing Service, Unix-Emulation Service, Checkpoint Service, etc.\ud
The Amoeba Kernel can produce a representation of the state of a process which can be given to another Kernel where it is accepted for continued execution. This state consists of the memory contents in the form of a collection of segments, and a Process Descriptor which contains the additional state, program counters, stack pointers, system call state, etc.\ud
Careful separation of mechanism and policy has resulted in a compact set of Kernel operations for process creation and management. A collection of user-space services provides process management policies and a simple interface for application programs.\ud
In this paper we shall describe the mechanisms as they are being implemented in the Amoeba Distributed System at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. We believe that the mechanisms described here can also apply to other distributed systems
EOS: A project to investigate the design and construction of real-time distributed embedded operating systems
The EOS project is investigating the design and construction of a family of real-time distributed embedded operating systems for reliable, distributed aerospace applications. Using the real-time programming techniques developed in co-operation with NASA in earlier research, the project staff is building a kernel for a multiple processor networked system. The first six months of the grant included a study of scheduling in an object-oriented system, the design philosophy of the kernel, and the architectural overview of the operating system. In this report, the operating system and kernel concepts are described. An environment for the experiments has been built and several of the key concepts of the system have been prototyped. The kernel and operating system is intended to support future experimental studies in multiprocessing, load-balancing, routing, software fault-tolerance, distributed data base design, and real-time processing
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