A Model of Cooperative Threads

We develop a model of concurrent imperative programming with threads. We focus on a small imperative language with cooperative threads which execute without interruption until they terminate or explicitly yield control. We define and study a trace-based denotational semantics for this language; this semantics is fully abstract but mathematically elementary. We also give an equational theory for the computational effects that underlie the language, including thread spawning. We then analyze threads in terms of the free algebra monad for this theory.Comment: 39 pages, 5 figure

Virtual Machine Support for Many-Core Architectures: Decoupling Abstract from Concrete Concurrency Models

The upcoming many-core architectures require software developers to exploit concurrency to utilize available computational power. Today's high-level language virtual machines (VMs), which are a cornerstone of software development, do not provide sufficient abstraction for concurrency concepts. We analyze concrete and abstract concurrency models and identify the challenges they impose for VMs. To provide sufficient concurrency support in VMs, we propose to integrate concurrency operations into VM instruction sets. Since there will always be VMs optimized for special purposes, our goal is to develop a methodology to design instruction sets with concurrency support. Therefore, we also propose a list of trade-offs that have to be investigated to advise the design of such instruction sets. As a first experiment, we implemented one instruction set extension for shared memory and one for non-shared memory concurrency. From our experimental results, we derived a list of requirements for a full-grown experimental environment for further research

Strategic directions in constraint programming

An abstract is not available

Problems with concurrent prolog

Computer Science Departmen

Concurrent Constraint Programming

This paper presents a new and very rich class of (con-current) programming languages, based on the notion of comput.ing with parhal information, and the con-commitant notions of consistency and entailment. ’ In this framework, computation emerges from the inter-action of concurrently executing agents that communi-cate by placing, checking and instantiating constraints on shared variables. Such a view of computation is in-teresting in the context of programming languages be-cause of the ability to represent and manipulate partial information about the domain of discourse, in the con-text of concurrency because of the use of constraints for communication and control, and in the context of AI because of the availability of simple yet powerful mechanisms for controlling inference, and the promise that very rich representational/programming languages, sharing the same set of abstract properties, may be pos-sible. To reflect this view of computation, [Sar89] develops the cc family of languages. We present here one mem-ber of the family, CC(.L,+) (pronounced “cc with Ask and Choose”) which provides the basic operations of blocking Ask and atomic Tell and an algebra of be-haviors closed under prefixing, indeterministic choice, interleaving, and hiding, and provides a mutual recur-sion operator. cc(.L,-t) is (intentionally!) very similar to Milner’s CCS, but for the radically different under-lying concept of communication, which, in fact, pro-’ The class is founded on the notion of “constraint logic pro-gramming ” [JL87,Mah87], fundamentally generalizes concurrent logic programming, and is the subject of the first author’s disser-tation [Sar89], on which this paper is substantially based

Default Timed Concurrent Constraint Programming

We extend the model of [VRV94] to express strong time-outs (and pre-emption): if an event A does not happen through time t, cause event B to happen at time t. Such constructs arise naturally in practice (e.g. in modeling transistors) and are supported in languages such as ESTEREL (through instantaneous watchdogs) and LUSTRE (through the "current" operator). The fundamental conceptual difficulty posed by these operators is that they are non-monotonic. We provide a simple compositional semantics to the non-monotonic version of concurrent constraint programming (CCP) obtained by changing the underlying logic from intuitionistic logic to Reiter's default logic [Rei80]. This allows us to use the same construction (uniform extension through time) to develop Default Timed CCP (Default tcc) as we had used to develop Timed CCP (tcc) from CCP [VRV94]. Indeed the smooth embedding of CCP processes into Default cc processes lifts to a smooth embedding of tcc processes into Default tcc..

Foundations of Timed Concurrent Constraint Programming

We develop a model for timed, reactive computation by extending the asynchronous, untimed concurrent constraint programming model in a simple and uniform way. In the spirit of process algebras, we develop some combinators expressible in this model, and reconcile their operational, logical and denotational character. We show how programs may be compiled into finite-state machines with loop-free computations at each state, thus guaranteeing bounded response time. 1 Introduction and Motivation Reactive systems [12,3,9] are those that react continuously with their environment at a rate controlled by the environment. Execution in a reactive system proceeds in bursts of activity. In each phase, the environment stimulates the system with an input, obtains a response in bounded time, and may then be inactive (with respect to the system) for an arbitrary period of time before initiating the next burst. Examples of reactive systems are controllers and signal-processing systems. The primary issu..