A definition of and linguistic support for partial quiescence
Billy Yan‐Kit Man, Hiu Ning Chan, Andrew J. Gallagher, Appu S. Goundan, Aaron W. Keen, Ronald A. Olsson · Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience · 2007
Abstract The global quiescence (GQ) of a distributed computation (or distributed termination detection) is an important problem. Some concurrent programming languages and systems provide GQ detection as a built‐in feature so that programmers do not need to write special synchronization code to detect quiescence. This paper introducespartial quiescence(PQ), which generalizes quiescence detection to a specified part of a distributed computation. PQ is useful, for example, when two independent concurrent computations that both rely on GQ need to be combined into a single program. The paper describes how we have designed and implemented a PQ mechanism within an experimental version of the JR concurrent programming language, and have gained experience with several representative applications. Our early results are promising qualitatively and quantitatively. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.