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Among all the interests in parallelism, there is an essential and fundamental one that has remained largely unexplored, namely the question of how to design parallel programs from their specification. And that is what this book is about. It proposes a method for the formal development of parallel programs - multiprograms as we have preferred to call them -, and it does so with a minimum of formal gear, viz. with the predicate calculus and with the meanwhile well-established theory of Owicki and Gries. The fact that one can get away with just this theory will probably not convey anything to the uninitiated, but it may all the more come as a surprise to those who were exposed earlier to correctness of multiprograms. Contrary to common belief, the Owicki/Gries theory can indeed be effectively put to work for the formal development of multiprograms, regardless of whether these algorithms are distributed or not. That is what we intend to exemplify with this book.
List of contents
1 On Our Computational Model.- 2 Our Program Notation and Its Semantics.- 3 The Core of the Owicki/Gries Theory.- 4 Two Disturbing Divergences.- 5 Bridling the Complexity.- 6 Co-assertions and Strengthening the Annotation.- 7 Three Theorems and Two Examples.- 8 Synchronization and Total Deadlock.- 9 Individual Progress and the Multibound.- 10 Concurrent Vector Writing.- 11 More Theorems and More Examples.- 12 The Yellow Pages.- 13 The Safe Sluice.- 14 Peterson's Two-Component Mutual Exclusion Algorithm.- 15 Re-inventing a Great Idea.- 16 On Handshake Protocols.- 17 Phase Synchronization for Two Machines.- 18 The Parallel Linear Search.- 19 The Initialization Protocol.- 20 Co-components.- 21 The Initialization Protocol Revisited.- 22 The Non-Blocking Write Protocol.- 23 Mutual Inclusion and Synchronous Communication.- 24 A Simple Election Algorithm.- 25 Peterson's General Mutual Exclusion Algorithm.- 26 Monitored Phase Synchronization.- 27 Distributed Liberal Phase Synchronization.- 28 Distributed Computation of a Spanning Tree.- 29 Shmuel Safra's Termination Detection Algorithm.- 30 The Alternating Bit Protocol.- 31 Peterson's Mutual Exclusion Algorithm Revisited.- 32 Epilogue.- References.
Summary
Here, the authors propose a method for the formal development of parallel programs - or multiprograms as they prefer to call them. They show that the Owicki/Gries theory can be effectively put to work for the formal development of multiprograms, regardless of whether these algorithms are distributed or not.
