RJ: a Java package providing JR‐like concurrent programming

The JR concurrent programming language extends Java with a richer concurrency model, by adding several new types and statements. JR provides dynamic remote virtual machine creation, dynamic remote object creation, remote method invocation, dynamic process creation, rendezvous, asynchronous message passing, semaphores, concurrent invocation, and shared variables. This paper presents RJ, a package for Java that provides JR‐like features. The paper gives an overview of RJ and its key features; describes the implications of RJ's design, including how RJ provides additional, useful flexibility; discusses the implementation of RJ; and gives qualitative and quantitative evaluations of our work with respect to feasibility and usability, experimentation, migration, and performance. RJ has been successful in meeting these goals and in providing insight into the trade‐offs between using a concurrent programming language versus using the equivalent concurrent package. Our work has yielded a few surprises in dealing with some concurrent programming language features, in understanding the run‐time performances of JR versus RJ programs, and in obtaining some additional, useful flexibility for concurrent programming applications. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An SR approach to multiway rendezvous

This paper presents a new approach to programming multiway rendezvous problems in the SR language. The approach uses SR's concurrent invocation statement and rendezvous mechanism to coordinate the interacting processes. This approach is compared with one that suggested an extension to SR's rendezvous mechanism. The two approaches result in differing program structure. The new approach is shown to lead to simpler and cleaner interfaces between the main process and the worker processes, and uses only existing language mechanisms. The results are of importance to both programmers and designers of concurrent program languages.     

Transformations for optimizing interprocess communication and synchronization mechanisms

This paper presents source-level transformations that improve the performance of programs using synchronous and asynchronous message passing primitives, including remote call to an active process (rendezvous). It also discusses the applicability of these transformations to shared memory and distributed environments. The transformations presented reduce the need for context switching, simplify the specific form of communication, and/or reduce the complexity of the given form of communication. One additional transformation actually increases the number of processes as well as the number of context switches to improve program performance. These transformations are shown to be generalizable. Results of hand-applying the transformations to SR programs indicate reductions in execution time exceeding 90% in many cases. The transformations also apply to many commonly occurring synchronization patterns and to other concurrent programming languages such as Ada and Concurrent C. The long term goal of this effort is to include such transformations as an otpimization step, performed automatically by a compiler.This work was supported by NSF under Grant Number CCR88-10617.     

面向Java的分布式程序测试系统

由于程序的分布运行,测试分布式程序必须同时考虑并发特性和运行环境.介绍了一个面向Java语言的分布式程序测试系统JDPT(Java-oriented distributed program testing system).JDPT基于运行环境定义事件,通过事件序列记录分布式程序的运行过程,并定义事件约束检测可行事件序列集的有效性.通过该技术,JDPT可以有效地判断程序在运行环境中并发执行的正确性,适用于跨平台的Java程序测试.     

Assembling a resolution multiprocessor from interface,programming and distributed processing components

An effective resolution multiprocessor can be built from distributed processing, logic programming, and interface elements. Widely used, portable, components can be modularly composed into a portable parallel system that displays good resistance to premature obsolescence by software evolution. A virtual multiprocessor offering common message passing and configuration services integrates a distributed mesh of sequential resolution engines. Users configure and control the resolution engines and virtual multiprocessor through a GUI using an embedded command language to drive its facilities. Prolog programs either explicitly control parallel execution through message passing or would have to rely on program transformation techniques to extract parallelism implicitly.     

Visualization of Message Passing Parallel Programs with the TOPSYS Parallel Programming Environment

Parallel programming is orders of magnitudes more complex than writing sequential programs. This is particularly true for programming distributed memory multiprocessor architectures based on message passing programming models. Apart from understanding the sequential parts of the parallel program, new degrees of freedom lead to additional problems. Understanding the synchronization and communication behavior of parallel programs is the most critical issue in programming distributed memory multiprocessors. The paper describes methods and tools for visualization and animation of the dynamic execution of parallel programs. Based on an evaluation and classification of existing visualization environments, the visualization and animation tool VISTOP (VISualization TOol for Parallel Systems) is presented as part of the integrated tool environment TOPSY S (TOols for Parallel SYStems) for programming distributed memory multiprocessors. VISTOP supports the interactive on-line visualization of message passing programs based on various views; in particular, a process graph based concurrency view for detecting synchronization and communication bugs.     

并发Java程序动态分析及重演技术研究

Java语言在并发程序方面的广泛应用对软件测试提出了新的挑战。众所周知,由于并发程序的不确定性,使得并发程序的设计、开发、调试和测试都非常困难。文章介绍了Safepro／Java中的多线程测试技术,通过对Java源程序进行适当的修改并且保持语义不变,跟踪并发Java程序的运行过程,收集有关数据并对数据进行分析,最终控制并发Java程序的重演。     

Asynchronous parallel simulation of parallel programs

Parallel simulation of parallel programs for large datasets has been shown to offer significant reduction in the execution time of many discrete event models. The paper describes the design and implementation of MPI-SIM, a library for the execution driven parallel simulation of task and data parallel programs. MPI-SIM can be used to predict the performance of existing programs written using MPI for message passing, or written in UC, a data parallel language, compiled to use message passing. The simulation models can be executed sequentially or in parallel. Parallel execution of the models are synchronized using a set of asynchronous conservative protocols. The paper demonstrates how protocol performance is improved by the use of application-level, runtime analysis. The analysis targets the communication patterns of the application. We show the application-level analysis for message passing and data parallel languages. We present the validation and performance results for the simulator for a set of applications that include the NAS Parallel Benchmark suite. The application-level optimization described in the paper yielded significant performance improvements in the simulation of parallel programs, and in some cases completely eliminated the synchronizations in the parallel execution of the simulation model     

基于有限状态进程的事件约束定义

测试分布式程序需要定义事件约束来检测程序执行产生的事件序列.事件约束需要根据程序的规约来推导.FSP是一类描述并发程序形式化规约的进程代数记法.它将并发进程描述为动作序列,其中动作可对应到规约级事件.E-CSPE约束在给定状态谓词下定义前后运行事件间的顺序关系.根据FSP的操作符和并发控制机制可推导E-CSPE约束.推导出来的E-CSPE约束考虑到并发程序的安全和进展属性,可据以判断程序运行的正确性和测试的充分性.     

Estimation of dynamical characteristics of a parallel program on a model

This paper considers a model of a parallel program that can efficiently be interpreted on an instrumental computer, providing a means for a sufficiently accurate prediction of the actual time needed for execution of the parallel program on a given parallel computational system. The model is designed for parallel programs with explicit message passing written in Java with calls to the MPI library and is a part of the ParJava environment. The model is obtained by transforming the program control tree, which, for Java programs, can be constructed by modifying the abstract syntax tree. The communication functions are simulated on the basis of the LogGP model, which makes it possible to take into account specific features of the distributed computational system.     

Concurrent programming in the Ada® language: The polling bias

The rendezvous is an important concept in concurrent programming—two processes need to synchronize, i.e. rendezvous, to exchange information. The Ada programming language is the first programming language to use the rendezvous as the basis of its concurrent programming facilities. Our experience with rendezvous facilities in the Ada language shows that these facilities lead to and encourage the design of programs that poll. Polling is generally, but not always, undesirable because it is wasteful of system resources. We illustrate and examine the reasons for polling bias in the Ada language. We give suggestions on how to avoid polling programs, and suggest changes to the rendezvous facilities to eliminate the polling bias. The ramifications of these changes to the implementation of the Ada language are also discussed. Although we have focused on the rendezvous facilities in the Ada language our analysis is also applicable to other languages. A polling bias can occur in any concurrent programming language based on the rendezvous mechanism if it does not provide appropriate facilities.     

Implementation of CSP-S for description of distributed algorithms

The implementation of CSP-S (a subset of CSP)—a high level language for distributed programming—is presented in this paper. The language CSP-S features a parallel command, communication by message passing and the use of guarded command. The implementation consists of a compiler translating the CSP-S constructs into intermediate language. The execution is carried out by a scheduler which creates an illusion of concurrency. Using the CSP-S language constructs, distributed algorithms are written, executed and tested with the compiler designed.     

Active optimistic and distributed message logging for message‐passing applications

Message logging is an attractive solution to provide fault tolerance for message‐passing applications because it is more scalable than coordinated checkpointing. Sender‐based message logging is a well‐known optimization that allows the saving of message payload in the sender memory. Thus, only message reception events have to be logged reliably by using an event logger. This paper proposes solutions to further improve message logging protocol scalability. In existing works on message logging, the event logger has always been considered as a centralized process. We propose a distributed event logger that takes advantage of multi‐core processors that are to be executed in parallel with application processes, leveraging the volatile memory of the nodes to save events reliably. We also propose the combination of our distributed event logger and O2P, an active optimistic message logging protocol using a gossip‐based protocol to disseminate information on new stable events. Our distributed event logger and O2P are implemented in the Open MPI library. Our results show the following: (i) distributed event logging improves message logging protocol scalability and (ii) using O2P with a distributed event logger provides an efficient and scalable fault‐tolerant solution for message‐passing applications. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

New mechanisms for invocation handling in concurrent programming languages

Invocation handling mechanism in many concurrent languages have significant limitations that make it difficult or costly to solve common programming situations encountered in program visualization, debugging, and scheduling scenarios. This paper discusses these limitations, introduces new language mechanisms aimed at remedying these limitations, and presents an implementation of the new mechanisms. The examples are given in SR; the new mechanisms and implementation are an extension of SR and its implementation. However, these new mechanisms are applicable to other concurrent languages. They can augment or replace current invocation handling mechanisms.     

Fairness in shared invocation servicing

Invocation servicing is an important aspect of many concurrent programming languages. Some invocation handling mechanisms allow for multiway servicing by multiple processes. This paper addresses fairness with respect to choosing which invocation to service and fairness with respect to choosing which process to perform the servicing. It examines how these fairness issues have been resolved in the SR concurrent programming language. This paper presents a new approach that eliminates several key restrictions. The new approach has been implemented in JR, an extended Java that includes SR-like synchronization mechanisms. This paper discusses design and implementation issues and tradeoffs.     

On the specification and implementation of distributed systems using NMDS and LIPS

This paper describes a graphical notation called NMDS and an implementation language called LIPS for producing distributed systems. NMDS is a set of notations based on Role Activity Diagrams with features for expressing concurrency, dataflow and communication and it lends itself to elicitation and verification while expressing concurrency unambiguously in a concise manner. It also fits in with the syntax and semantics of LIPS. LIPS is a distributed message passing language that promotes the separation of communication from computation by using the concept of guarded processes. One of the major advantages of using NMDS with LIPS is that reverse engineering of LIPS programs can easily be achieved.     

Formalising Java RMI with explicit code mobility

This paper presents an object-oriented, Java-like core language with primitives for distributed programming and explicit code mobility. We apply our formulation to prove the correctness of several optimisations for distributed programs. Our language captures crucial but often hidden aspects of distributed object-oriented programming, including object serialisation, dynamic class downloading and remote method invocation. It is defined in terms of an operational semantics that concisely models the behaviour of distributed programs using machinery from calculi of mobile processes. Type safety is established using invariant properties for distributed runtime configurations. We argue that primitives for explicit code mobility offer a programmer fine-grained control of type-safe code distribution, which is crucial for improving the performance and safety of distributed object-oriented applications.     

A Metric for the Temporal Characterization of Parallel Programs

We consider the time-dependent demands for data movement that a parallel program makes on the architecture that executes it. The result is an architecture-independent metric that represents the temporal behavior of data-movement requirements. Programs are described as series of computations and data movements, and while message passing is not ruled out, we focus on explicit parallel programs using a fixed number of processes in a distributed shared-memory environment. Operations are assumed to be explicitly allocated to processors when the metric is applied, which might correspond to intermediate code in a parallelizing compiler. The metric is called the interprocess read (IR) temporal metric. A key to developing an architecture-independent temporal metric is modeling program execution time in an architecture-independent way. This is possible because well-synchronized parallel programs make coordinated progress above a certain level of granularity. Our execution time characterization takes into account barrier synchronization and critical sections. We illustrate the metric using instruction count on simple code fragments and then from multiprocessor program traces (Splash benchmarks). Results of running the benchmarks on simulated network architectures show that the IR metric for the time scale of network response predicts performance better than whole program measures.     

在开放世界中实现逃逸分析

逃逸分析(escape analysis)是一种可以有效减少Java程序中同步负载和内存堆分配压力的跨函数全局数据流分析算法.此前绝大多数逃逸分析的实现都基于一个所谓"封闭世界(closed world)"的前提:所有可能被执行的方法在做逃逸分析前都已经得知,并且,程序的实际运行不会改变它们之间的调用关系.但当真实的Java程序运行时,这样的假设并不成立.Java程序拥有的许多特性,例如动态类加载、调用本地函数以及反射程序调用等等,都将打破所谓"封闭世界"的约定.这样的真实运行环境被称为"开放世界".在开放世界中,实现逃逸分析将面临许多重要的问题,例如,能否正确、全面地捕捉动态载入的类和方法,并分析它们与原有程序的关系;逃逸分析算法的复杂性是否能够得以控制,以保证即时编译器的重新分析时间不会过长,等等.提出一个新的逃逸分析架构,它可以有效地处理上述开放世界所面临的问题.该分析架构将增量分析Java程序,动态捕获新载入和调用的类及方法,同时,在复杂性和精度之间进行权衡,正确、有效地降低程序的运行负载.该分析架构已经在Intel的开放式Java虚拟机系统ORP中实现,经过实际测试,可以有效地消除一些主要基准测试程...     

FORTRAN M - A Language for Modular Parallel Programming

FORTRAN M is a small set of extensions to FORTRAN 77 that supports a modular approach to the design of message-passing programs. It has the following features. (1) Modularity. Programs are constructed by using explicitly declared communication channels to plug together program modules called processes. A process can encapsulate common data, subprocesses, and internal communication. (2) Safety. Operations on channels are restricted so as to guarantee deterministic execution, even in dynamic computations that create and delete processes and channels. Channels are typed, so a compiler can check for correct usage. (3) Architecture Independence. The mapping of processes to processors can be specified with respect to a virtual computer with size and shape different from that of the target computer. Mapping is specified by annotations that influence performance but not correctness. (4) Efficiency. FORTRAN M can be compiled efficiently for uniprocessors, shared-memory computers, distributed-memory computers, and networks of workstations. Because message passing is incorporated into the language, a compiler can optimize communication as well as computation.