Summary: A Criterion for Atomicity
James H. Anderson \Lambda
Department of Computer Science
The University of Maryland at College Park
College Park, Maryland 20742­3255
Mohamed G. Gouda y
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712­1188
July 1990
Revised June 1991
Abstract
Most proof methods for reasoning about concurrent programs are based upon the interleaving
semantics of concurrent computation: a concurrent program is executed in a stepwise fashion,
with only one enabled action being executed at each step. Interleaving semantics, in effect,
requires that a concurrent program be executed as a nondeterministic sequential program. This
is clearly an abstraction of the way in which concurrent programs are actually executed. To
ensure that this is a reasonable abstraction, interleaving semantics should only be used to
reason about programs with ``simple'' actions; we call such programs ``atomic.'' In this paper,
we formally characterize the class of atomic programs. We adopt the criterion that a program

Source: Anderson, James - Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences