The Synchronous Approach to Concurrency

Abstract

Synchronous systems are concurrent systems in which the components proceed in a lockstep fashion. An early investigated model of synchronous systems are cellular automata [vN66, Vol79], where the synchronously working components, which are called “cells” in this context, communicate according to some regular interconnection scheme, so that each cell only communicates with its neighbors. This abstraction is appropriate in applications in which the signal travel time in the system is not negligible. A more general model of synchronously working systems assumes a broadcasting communication, i.e., it assumes that an output of a component is instantaneously visible to each other component. In this section, we will investigate such a model of synchronous systems.