Partial memoization of concurrency and communication

Memoization is a well-known optimization technique used to eliminate redundant calls for pure functions. If a call to a function f with argument v yields result r, a subsequent call to f with v can be immediately reduced to r without the need to re-evaluate f's body. Understanding memoization in the presence of concurrency and communication is significantly more challenging. For example, if f communicates with other threads, it is not sufficient to simply record its input/output behavior; we must also track inter-thread dependencies induced by these communication actions. Subsequent calls to f can be elided only if we can identify an interleaving of actions from these call-sites that lead to states in which these dependencies are satisfied. Similar issues arise if f spawns additional threads. In this paper, we consider the memoization problem for a higher-order concurrent language whose threads may communicate through synchronous message-based communication. To avoid the need to ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICFP
• Authors: Lukasz Ziarek, K. C. Sivaramakrishnan, Suresh Jagannathan
• Keywords: Communication Dependencies, ICFP 2009, Programming Languages, Spawns Additional Threads, Synchronous Message-based Communication