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Concurrency Among Strangers

Programming in E as Plan Coordination

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Trustworthy Global Computing (TGC 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3705))

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Abstract

Programmers write programs, expressing plans for machines to execute. When composed so that they may cooperate, plans may instead interfere with each other in unanticipated ways. Plan coordination is the art of simultaneously enabling plans to cooperate, while avoiding hazards of destructive plan interference. For sequential computation within a single machine, object programming supports plan coordination well. For concurrent computation, this paper shows how hard it is to use locking to prevent plans from interfering without also destroying their ability to cooperate.

In Internet-scale computing, machines proceed concurrently, interact across barriers of large latencies and partial failure, and encounter each other’s misbehavior. Each dimension presents new plan coordination challenges. This paper explains how the E language addresses these joint challenges by changing only a few concepts of conventional sequential object programming. Several projects are adapting these insights to existing platforms.

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11580850_20 .

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Johns Hopkins University, USA

    Mark S. Miller, E. Dean Tribble & Jonathan Shapiro

  2. Hewlett Packard Laboratories, USA

    Mark S. Miller

Authors
  1. Mark S. Miller
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  2. E. Dean Tribble
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  3. Jonathan Shapiro
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica, Università di Firenze, Italy

    Rocco De Nicola

  2. Università di Bologna, Italy

    Davide Sangiorgi

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Miller, M.S., Tribble, E.D., Shapiro, J. (2005). Concurrency Among Strangers. In: De Nicola, R., Sangiorgi, D. (eds) Trustworthy Global Computing. TGC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3705. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11580850_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11580850_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-30007-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31483-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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