Parallel Programs with Shared Variables

Abstract

Disjoint Parallelism IS a rather restricted form of concurrency. In applications, concurrently operating components often share resources, such as a common database, a line printer or a data bus. Sharing is necessary when resources are too costly to have one copy for each component, as in the case of a large database. Sharing is also useful to establish communication between different components, as in the case of a data bus. This form of concurrency can be modeled by means of parallel programs with shared variables, variables that can be changed and read by several components. Design and verification of parallel programs with shared variables are much more demanding than those of disjoint parallel programs. The reason is that the individual components of such a parallel program can interfere with each other by changing the shared variables. To restrict the points of interference, we consider so-called atomic regions. whose execution cannot be interrupted by other components.