Real-World Concurrency

ABSTRACT

In this look at how concurrency affects practitioners in the real world, Cantrill and Bonwick argue that much of the anxiety over concurrency is unwarranted. Most developers who build typical MVC systems can leverage parallelism by combining pieces of already concurrent software such as database and operating systems (i.e., concurrency through architecture), rather than by writing multithreaded code themselves. And for those who actually must deal with threads and locks, the authors include a helpful list of best practices to help minimize the pain.

REFERENCES

• 1: Herb Sutter , James Larus, Software and the concurrency revolution, Queue, v.3 n.7, September 2005 [doi>10.1145/1095408.1095421]
• 2: David DeWitt , Jim Gray, Parallel database systems: the future of high performance database systems, Communications of the ACM, v.35 n.6, p.85-98, June 1992 [doi>10.1145/129888.129894]
• 3: Mark Oskin, The revolution inside the box, Communications of the ACM, v.51 n.7, July 2008 [doi>10.1145/1364782.1364799]
• 4: Luiz André Barroso , Kourosh Gharachorloo , Robert McNamara , Andreas Nowatzyk , Shaz Qadeer , Barton Sano , Scott Smith , Robert Stets , Ben Verghese, Piranha: a scalable architecture based on single-chip multiprocessing, Proceedings of the 27th annual international symposium on Computer architecture, p.282-293, June 2000, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 5: Nir Shavit, Technical perspective; Transactions are tomorrow's loads and stores, Communications of the ACM, v.51 n.8, August 2008 [doi>10.1145/1378704.1378724]
• 6: Bryan Cantrill, Hidden in plain sight, Queue, v.4 n.1, February 2006 [doi>10.1145/1117389.1117401]
• 7: McKusick, K. A. 2006. A conversation with Jarod Jenson. ACM Queue 4(1): 16-24.
• 8: Cantrill, B. 2003. Postmortem object type identification. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Automated Debugging.
• 9: Peyton Jones, S. 2007. Beautiful concurrency. In Beautiful Code, ed. A. Oram and G. Wilson. Cambridge, MA: O'Reilly.
• 10: See reference 8.
• 11: Cantrill, B. 2007. A spoonful of sewage. In Beautiful Code, ed. A. Oram and G. Wilson. Cambridge, MA: O'Reilly.
• 12: See reference 6.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.1 Process Management
          Subjects: Concurrency

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.1 COMPUTATION BY ABSTRACT DEVICES
      F.1.2 Modes of Computation
          Subjects: Parallelism and concurrency

  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.4 Systems
          Subjects: Concurrency

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Theory