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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

VLSI architecture for concurrent data structures

Thesis/Dissertation ·
OSTI ID:7157200
Concurrent data structures simplify the development of concurrent programs by encapsulating commonly used mechanisms for synchronization and communication into data structures. This thesis develops a notation for describing concurrent data structures, presents examples of concurrent data structures, and describes an architecture to support concurrent data structures. Concurrent Smalltalk (CST), a derivative of Smalltalk-80 with extensions for concurrency, is developed to describe concurrent data structures. CST allows the programmer to specify objects that are distributed over the nodes of a concurrent computer. These distributed objects have many constituent objects and thus can process many messages simultaneously. They are the foundation upon which concurrent data structures are built. Considering graphs as concurrent data structures, graph algorithms are presented for the shortest-path problem, the max-flow problem, and graph partitioning. These algorithms introduce new synchronization techniques to achieve better performance than existing algorithms. A message passing, concurrent architecture is developed that exploits the characteristics of VLSI technology to support concurrent data structures.
Research Organization:
California Inst. of Tech., Pasadena (USA)
OSTI ID:
7157200
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English