Scalable nonblocking concurrent objects for mission critical code

The high degree of complexity and autonomy of future robotic space missions, such as Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), poses serious challenges in assuring their reliability and efficiency. Providing fast and safe concurrent synchronization is of critical importance to such autonomous embedded software systems. The application of nonblocking synchronization is known to help eliminate the hazards of deadlock, livelock, and priority inversion. The nonblocking programming techniques are notoriously difficult to implement and offer a variety of semantic guarantees and usability and performance trade-offs. The present software development and certification methodologies applied at NASA do not reach the level of detail of providing guidelines for the design of concurrent software. The complex task of engineering reliable and efficient concurrent synchronization is left to the programmer’s ingenuity. A number of Software Transactional Memory (STM) approaches gained wide popularity because...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Damian Dechev, Bjarne Stroustrup
• Keywords: Concurrent Synchronization, Nonblocking Synchronization, Nonblocking Transactions, OOPSLA 2009, Security Privacy