PARATRAN: A TRANSPARENT, TRANSACTION BASED RUNTIME MECHANISM FOR PARALLEL EXECUTION OF SCHEME
Mason J. Katz · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 1989
The number of applications requiring high speed symbolic computation and the performance reqmrements of these projects are both rapidly increasing. However, the computer science commumty's ability to produce high performance urnprocessor hardware is being outstripped by these needs. Therefore, we propose a unique multiprocessing solution to the high speed, symbolic computation problem. Our approach is to develop a llansparent runtime mechanism for executing standard, sequential Lisp code on a multiprocessor computer. ParaTran, as we call our system, is based on the concept of atomic transactions as developed for use in distributed database systems, programming languages, and operating systems. It u 'ttlizes an optimistic scheduling algorithm for processing transactions in order to maximize the available parallelism. In this way, we believe that we can create a system which is both easy to use and yields exceptional performance.