Abstract
Conventional semantics for shared-variable concurrency suffers from the “grain of time” problem, i.e., the necessity of specifying a default level of atomicity. We propose a semantics that avoids any such choice by regarding all interference that is not controlled by explicit critical regions as catastrophic. It is based on three principles:
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Operations have duration and can overlap one another during execution.
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If two overlapping operations touch the same location, the meaning of the program execution is “wrong”.
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If, from a given starting state, execution of a program can give “wrong”, then no other possibilities need be considered.
Research was partially supported by National Science Foundation Grant CCR-0204242, by an EPSRC Visiting Fellowship at Edinburgh University, and by the Basic Research in Computer Science (http://www.brics.dk/) Centre of the Danish National Research Foundation. A more preliminary version of this material was presented at POPL 2004 [1].
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References
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Reynolds, J.C. (2004). Toward a Grainless Semantics for Shared-Variable Concurrency. In: Lodaya, K., Mahajan, M. (eds) FSTTCS 2004: Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science. FSTTCS 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3328. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30538-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30538-5_4
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