Real-World Concurrency: In this look at how concurrency affects practitioners in the real world, Cantrill and Bonwick argue that much of the anxiety over concurrency is unwarranted.

Abstract

Software practitioners today could be forgiven if recent microprocessor developments have given them some trepidation about the future of software. While Moore’s law continues to hold (that is, transistor density continues to double roughly every 18 months), as a result of both intractable physical limitations and practical engineering considerations, that increasing density is no longer being spent on boosting clock rate. Instead, it is being used to put multiple CPU cores on a single CPU die. From the software perspective, this is not a revolutionary shift, but rather an evolutionary one: multicore CPUs are not the birthing of a new paradigm, but rather the progression of an old one (multiprocessing) into more widespread deployment.

References

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Concurrent computing methodologies

• Information systems

  • Data management systems

    • Database management system engines

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Contextual software domains

      • Operating systems

        • Process management

          • Concurrency control

• Theory of computation

  • Models of computation

    • Concurrency

      • Parallel computing models