Uniform confluence in concurrent computation

Indeterminism is typical for concurrent computation. If several concurrent actors compete for the same resource then at most one of them may succeed, whereby the choice of the successful actor is indeterministic. As a consequence, the execution of a concurrent program may be nonconfluent. Even worse, most observables (termination, computational result, and time complexity) typically depend on the scheduling of actors created during program execution. This property contrast concurrent programs from purely functional programs. A functional program is uniformly confluent in the sense that all its possible executions coincide modulo reordering of execution steps. In this paper, we investigate concurrent programs that are uniformly confluent and their relation to eager and lazy functional programs. We study uniform confluence in concurrent computation within the applicative core of the -calculus which is widely used in different models of concurrent programming (with interleaving semantics...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: JFP
• Authors: Joachim Niehren
• Keywords: Concurrent Computation, Concurrent Programs, JFP 2000, Time Complexity