Chapters 1 & 2

Concurrency
and Abstraction
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Sequential & Concurrent Execution

A sequential process is an activity resulting from the execution of a program with its data on a sequential processor [Shaw, Logical Design of O/S] Concurrent execution means sequential processes whose execution are overlapped even in part (paralel sometimes) Concurrent languages : Concurrent Pascal, Modula, Ada, Occam, Linda etc.
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Concurrent Programming Abstraction

Definition 2.1 A concurrent program consists of a finite set of (sequential) processes. The processes are written using a finite set of atomic statements. The execution of a concurrent program proceeds by executing a sequence of the atomic statements obtained by arbitrarily interleaving the atomic statements from the processes. A computation (a scenario) is an execution sequence that can occur as a result of the interleaving
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Definition 2.2
During a computation the control pointer (instruction pointer, location counter) of a process indicates the next statement that can be executed by the process. Each process has its own control pointer

Interleaving of Processes

Suppose we have two processes,

p composed of statements p1 followed by p2 q composed of statements q1 followed by q2 The execution is started with the control pointers of the two processes pointing to p1 and q1

Possible scenarios of interleaving are shown below

Note that p2 -> p1 -> q1 ->q2 is not a scenario because p2 can not be executed before p1

Notation

The program has a title followed by declarations of global variables followed by processes in columns. Each process may have declarations of local variables followed by the statements of a process Each labeled line in the code is assumed to be an atomic statement
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State of a Concurrent Algorithm

Definition 2.3

The state of a (concurrent) algorithm is a tuple (a pair, a triple, a quadruple, etc.) consisting of one element for each process that is a label from that process (next statement), and one element for each global or local variable that is a value whose type is the same as the type of the variable.

State Diagram of the Sequential Program

A node is a state, arrows are transitions, and the short arrow on the left is the initial state
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State Diagram of the Concurrent Program

Left hand states: p1 followed by q1 Right hand states: q1 followed by p1

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Scenarios

A scenario is defined by a sequence of states A scenario can be represented as a state table instead of a state graph which may be difficult to draw for complicated programs
A scenario for the trivial concurrent program shown as a sequence of states

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Atomic Statements

The concurrent programming abstraction presented so far has been defined in terms of the interleaving of atomic statements An atomic statement is a statement which is executed to completion without the possibilty of interleaving statements from another process. In other words, we assume that it is uninterruptable.

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Algorithm with Atomic Assignment Statements

Consider the following algorithm and its two possible scenarios

In both scenarios, the final value of the global variable n is 2

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Modified Algorithm

In the following form of the previous algorithm, each atomic reference refers the global variable n at most once

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A Correct Scenario

In this scenario, the final value of the global variable n is 2

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An Incorrect Scenario

The final value of the global variable n is 1 which is not correct Rule of the book : Assignment statements are atomic statements, as are evaluations of boolean conditions in control statements The rule is not realistic but we will use it in order to be able to test the correctness of concurrent programs
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