Correct — let alone graceful — termination of parallel systems is sometimes thought to be a difficult problem. This is particularly imagined to be so under the pure message-passing MIMD discipline of occam and transputer networks, where global operations (like setting a shared flag or abortions) are not allowed and where time-outs cannot be set for every communication. This paper describes some common, but erroneous, occam approaches to this problem and contrasts them with what can be done in Ada [0, 1, 2]. These methods are all rejected on the grounds of insecurity and performance overheads. A simple, legal, secure and efficient occam method is then presented. This method also solves a much more important problem — the general (or partial) resetting of a parallel system (or sub-system). The resetting mechanism is quite independent of the parallel application algorithm, which can therefore be developed without worrying about such matters. This separation of concerns is good software engineering and is fully supported by the occam philosophy. Finally, an application of this resetting mechanism is described that permits the dynamic reconstruction of occam network topologies
