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Concurrent computing
(Redirected from Concurrent programming)
Concurrent computing is a form of computing in which several computations are executed
concurrently—during overlapping time periods—instead of sequentially—with one completing before the
next starts.
is is a property of a system—whether a program, computer, or a network—where there is a separate
execution point or "thread of control" for each process. A concurrent system is one where a computation
can advance without waiting for all other computations to complete.[1]
Concurrent computing is a form of modular programming. In its paradigm an overall computation is
factored into subcomputations that may be executed concurrently. Pioneers in the field of concurrent
computing include Edsger Dijkstra, Per Brinch Hansen, and C.A.R. Hoare.[2]
Introduction
e concept of concurrent computing is frequently confused with the related but distinct concept of
parallel computing,[3][4] although both can be described as "multiple processes executing during the
same period of time". In parallel computing, execution occurs at the same physical instant: for example,
on separate processors of a multi-processor machine, with the goal of speeding up computations
—parallel computing is impossible on a (one-core) single processor, as only one computation can occur
at any instant (during any single clock cycle).[a] By contrast, concurrent computing consists of process
lifetimes overlapping, but execution need not happen at the same instant. e goal here is to model
processes in the outside world that happen concurrently, such as multiple clients accessing a server at
the same time. Structuring soware systems as composed of multiple concurrent, communicating parts
can be useful for tackling complexity, regardless of whether the parts can be executed in parallel.[5]:1
For example, concurrent processes can be executed on one core by interleaving the execution steps of
each process via time-sharing slices: only one process runs at a time, and if it does not complete during
its time slice, it is paused, another process begins or resumes, and then later the original process is
resumed. In this way, multiple processes are part-way through execution at a single instant, but only
one process is being executed at that instant.
Concurrent computations may be executed in parallel,[3][6] for example, by assigning each process to a
separate processor or processor core, or distributing a computation across a network.
e exact timing of when tasks in a concurrent system are executed depends on the scheduling, and
tasks need not always be executed concurrently. For example, given two tasks, T1 and T2:
▪ T1 may be executed and finished before T2 or vice versa (serial and sequential)
▪ T1 and T2 may be executed alternately (serial and concurrent)
▪ T1 and T2 may be executed simultaneously at the same instant of time (parallel and
concurrent)
e word "sequential" is used as an antonym for both "concurrent" and "parallel"; when these are
explicitly distinguished, concurrent/sequential and parallel/serial are used as opposing pairs.[7] A
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schedule in which tasks execute one at a time (serially, no parallelism), without interleaving
(sequentially, no concurrency: no task begins until the prior task ends) is called a serial schedule. A set
of tasks that can be scheduled serially is serializable, which simplifies concurrency control.
Coordinating access to shared resources
e main challenge in designing concurrent programs is concurrency control: ensuring the correct
sequencing of the interactions or communications between different computational executions, and
coordinating access to resources that are shared among executions.[6] Potential problems include race
conditions, deadlocks, and resource starvation. For example, consider the following algorithm to make
withdrawals from a checking account represented by the shared resource balance:
1 bool withdraw(int withdrawal)
2 {
3 if (balance >= withdrawal)
4 {
5 balance -= withdrawal;
6 return true;
7 }
8 return false;
9 }
Suppose balance = 500, and two concurrent threads make the calls withdraw(300) and
withdraw(350). If line 3 in both operations executes before line 5 both operations will find that
balance >= withdrawal evaluates to true, and execution will proceed to subtracting the
withdrawal amount. However, since both processes perform their withdrawals, the total amount
withdrawn will end up being more than the original balance. ese sorts of problems with shared
resources benefit from the use of concurrency control, or non-blocking algorithms.
Advantages
e advantages of concurrent computing include:
▪ Increased program throughput—parallel execution of a concurrent program allows the
number of tasks completed in a given time to increase proportionally to the number of
processors according to Gustafson's law
▪ High responsiveness for input/output—input/output-intensive programs mostly wait
for input or output operations to complete. Concurrent programming allows the time
that would be spent waiting to be used for another task.
▪ More appropriate program structure—some problems and problem domains are well-
suited to representation as concurrent tasks or processes.
Models
Introduced in 1962, Petri nets were an early aempt to codify the rules of concurrent execution.
Dataflow theory later built upon these, and Dataflow architectures were created to physically
implement the ideas of dataflow theory. Beginning in the late 1970s, process calculi such as Calculus of
Communicating Systems (CCS) and Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) were developed to
permit algebraic reasoning about systems composed of interacting components. e π-calculus added
the capability for reasoning about dynamic topologies.
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Input/output automata were introduced in 1987.
Logics such as Lamport's TLA+, and mathematical models such as traces and Actor event diagrams,
have also been developed to describe the behavior of concurrent systems.
Soware transactional memory borrows from database theory the concept of atomic transactions and
applies them to memory accesses.
Consistency models
Concurrent programming languages and multiprocessor programs must have a consistency model (also
known as a memory model). e consistency model defines rules for how operations on computer
memory occur and how results are produced.
One of the first consistency models was Leslie Lamport's sequential consistency model. Sequential
consistency is the property of a program that its execution produces the same results as a sequential
program. Specifically, a program is sequentially consistent if "the results of any execution is the same as
if the operations of all the processors were executed in some sequential order, and the operations of
each individual processor appear in this sequence in the order specified by its program".[8]
Implementation
A number of different methods can be used to implement concurrent programs, such as implementing
each computational execution as an operating system process, or implementing the computational
processes as a set of threads within a single operating system process.
Interaction and communication
In some concurrent computing systems, communication between the concurrent components is hidden
from the programmer (e.g., by using futures), while in others it must be handled explicitly. Explicit
communication can be divided into two classes:
Shared memory communication
Concurrent components communicate by altering the contents of shared memory
locations (exemplified by Java and C#). This style of concurrent programming usually
needs the use of some form of locking (e.g., mutexes, semaphores, or monitors) to
coordinate between threads. A program that properly implements any of these is
said to be thread-safe.
Message passing communication
Concurrent components communicate by exchanging messages (exemplified by MPI,
Go, Scala, Erlang and occam). The exchange of messages may be carried out
asynchronously, or may use a synchronous "rendezvous" style in which the sender
blocks until the message is received. Asynchronous message passing may be reliable
or unreliable (sometimes referred to as "send and pray"). Message-passing
concurrency tends to be far easier to reason about than shared-memory
concurrency, and is typically considered a more robust form of concurrent
programming. A wide variety of mathematical theories to understand and analyze
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message-passing systems are available, including the actor model, and various
process calculi. Message passing can be efficiently implemented via symmetric
multiprocessing, with or without shared memory cache coherence.
Shared memory and message passing concurrency have different performance characteristics. Typically
(although not always), the per-process memory overhead and task switching overhead is lower in a
message passing system, but the overhead of message passing is greater than for a procedure call. ese
differences are oen overwhelmed by other performance factors.
History
Concurrent computing developed out of earlier work on railroads and telegraphy, from the 19th and
early 20th century, and some terms date to this period, such as semaphores. ese arose to address the
question of how to handle multiple trains on the same railroad system (avoiding collisions and
maximizing efficiency) and how to handle multiple transmissions over a given set of wires (improving
efficiency), such as via time-division multiplexing (1870s).
e academic study of concurrent algorithms started in the 1960s, with Dijkstra (1965) credited with
being the first paper in this field, identifying and solving mutual exclusion.[9]
Prevalence
Concurrency is pervasive in computing, occurring from low-level hardware on a single chip to
worldwide networks. Examples follow.
At the programming language level:
▪ Channel
▪ Coroutine
▪ Futures and promises
At the operating system level:
▪ Computer multitasking, including both cooperative multitasking and preemptive
multitasking
▪ Time-sharing, which replaced sequential batch processing of jobs with concurrent
use of a system
▪ Process
▪ Thread
At the network level, networked systems are generally concurrent by their nature, as they consist of
separate devices.
Languages supporting concurrent programming
Concurrent programming languages are programming languages that use language constructs for
concurrency. ese constructs may involve multi-threading, support for distributed computing,
message passing, shared resources (including shared memory) or futures and promises. Such languages
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are sometimes described as concurrency-oriented languages or concurrency-oriented programming
languages (COPL).[10]
Today, the most commonly used programming languages that have specific constructs for concurrency
are Java and C#. Both of these languages fundamentally use a shared-memory concurrency model, with
locking provided by monitors (although message-passing models can and have been implemented on
top of the underlying shared-memory model). Of the languages that use a message-passing
concurrency model, Erlang is probably the most widely used in industry at present.
Many concurrent programming languages have been developed more as research languages (e.g. Pict)
rather than as languages for production use. However, languages such as Erlang, Limbo, and occam
have seen industrial use at various times in the last 20 years. A non-exhaustive list of languages which
use or provide concurrent programming facilities:
▪ Ada—general purpose, with native support for message passing and monitor based
concurrency
▪ Alef—concurrent, with threads and message passing, for system programming in early
versions of Plan 9 from Bell Labs
▪ Alice—extension to Standard ML, adds support for concurrency via futures
▪ Ateji PX—extension to Java with parallel primitives inspired from π-calculus
▪ Axum—domain specific, concurrent, based on actor model and .NET Common
Language Runtime using a C-like syntax
▪ BMDFM—Binary Modular DataFlow Machine
▪ C++—thread and coroutine support libraries[11][12]
▪ Cω (C omega)—for research, extends C#, uses asynchronous communication
▪ C#—supports concurrent computing using lock, yield, also since version 5.0 async and
await keywords introduced
▪ Clojure—modern, functional dialect of Lisp on the Java platform
▪ Concurrent Clean—functional programming, similar to Haskell
▪ Concurrent Collections (CnC)—Achieves implicit parallelism independent of memory
model by explicitly defining flow of data and control
▪ Concurrent Haskell—lazy, pure functional language operating concurrent processes on
shared memory
▪ Concurrent ML—concurrent extension of Standard ML
▪ Concurrent Pascal—by Per Brinch Hansen
▪ Curry
▪ D—multi-paradigm system programming language with explicit support for
concurrent programming (actor model)
▪ E—uses promises to preclude deadlocks
▪ ECMAScript—uses promises for asynchronous operations
▪ Eiffel—through its SCOOP mechanism based on the concepts of Design by Contract
▪ Elixir—dynamic and functional meta-programming aware language running on the
Erlang VM.
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▪ Erlang—uses synchronous or asynchronous message passing with no shared memory
▪ FAUST—real-time functional, for signal processing, compiler provides automatic
parallelization via OpenMP or a specific work-stealing scheduler
▪ Fortran—coarrays and do concurrent are part of Fortran 2008 standard
▪ Go—for system programming, with a concurrent programming model based on CSP
▪ Haskell—concurrent, and parallel functional programming language[13]
▪ Hume—functional, concurrent, for bounded space and time environments where
automata processes are described by synchronous channels patterns and message
passing
▪ Io—actor-based concurrency
▪ Janus—features distinct askers and tellers to logical variables, bag channels; is purely
declarative
▪ Java—thread class or Runnable interface
▪ Julia—"concurrent programming primitives: Tasks, async-wait, Channels."[14]
▪ JavaScript—via web workers, in a browser environment, promises, and callbacks.
▪ JoCaml—concurrent and distributed channel based, extension of OCaml, implements
the join-calculus of processes
▪ Join Java—concurrent, based on Java language
▪ Joule—dataflow-based, communicates by message passing
▪ Joyce—concurrent, teaching, built on Concurrent Pascal with features from CSP by Per
Brinch Hansen
▪ LabVIEW—graphical, dataflow, functions are nodes in a graph, data is wires between
the nodes; includes object-oriented language
▪ Limbo—relative of Alef, for system programming in Inferno (operating system)
▪ Locomotive BASIC—Amstrad variant of BASIC contains EVERY and AFTER commands
for concurrent subroutines
▪ MultiLisp—Scheme variant extended to support parallelism
▪ Modula-2—for system programming, by N. Wirth as a successor to Pascal with native
support for coroutines
▪ Modula-3—modern member of Algol family with extensive support for threads,
mutexes, condition variables
▪ Newsqueak—for research, with channels as first-class values; predecessor of Alef
▪ occam—influenced heavily by communicating sequential processes (CSP)
▪ occam-π—a modern variant of occam, which incorporates ideas from Milner's
π-calculus
▪ Orc—heavily concurrent, nondeterministic, based on Kleene algebra
▪ Oz-Mozart—multiparadigm, supports shared-state and message-passing concurrency,
and futures
▪ ParaSail—object-oriented, parallel, free of pointers, race conditions
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▪ Pict—essentially an executable implementation of Milner's π-calculus
▪ Raku includes classes for threads, promises and channels by default[15]
▪ Python — uses thread-based parallelism and process-based parallelism [16]
▪ Reia—uses asynchronous message passing between shared-nothing objects
▪ Red/System—for system programming, based on Rebol
▪ Rust—for system programming, using message-passing with move semantics, shared
immutable memory, and shared mutable memory.[17]
▪ Scala—general purpose, designed to express common programming patterns in a
concise, elegant, and type-safe way
▪ SequenceL—general purpose functional, main design objectives are ease of
programming, code clarity-readability, and automatic parallelization for performance
on multicore hardware, and provably free of race conditions
▪ SR—for research
▪ SuperPascal—concurrent, for teaching, built on Concurrent Pascal and Joyce by Per
Brinch Hansen
▪ Swift—built-in support for writing asynchronous and parallel code in a structured
way[18]
▪ Unicon—for research
▪ TNSDL—for developing telecommunication exchanges, uses asynchronous message
passing
▪ VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL)—IEEE STD-1076
▪ XC—concurrency-extended subset of C language developed by XMOS, based on
communicating sequential processes, built-in constructs for programmable I/O
Many other languages provide support for concurrency in the form of libraries, at levels roughly
comparable with the above list.
See also
▪ Asynchronous I/O
▪ Chu space
▪ Flow-based programming
▪ Java ConcurrentMap
▪ Ptolemy Project
▪ Race condition § Computing
▪ Structured concurrency
▪ Transaction processing
Notes
a. This is discounting parallelism internal to a processor core, such as pipelining or
vectorized instructions. A one-core, one-processor machine may be capable of some
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parallelism, such as with a coprocessor, but the processor alone is not.
References
1. Operating System Concepts 9th edition, Abraham Silberschatz. "Chapter 4: Threads"
2. Hansen, Per Brinch, ed. (2002). The Origin of Concurrent Programming (https://link.sprin
ger.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3472-0). doi:10.1007/978-1-4757-3472-0 (https://doi.
org/10.1007%2F978-1-4757-3472-0). ISBN 978-1-4419-2986-0. S2CID 44909506 (https://
api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:44909506).
3. Pike, Rob (2012-01-11). "Concurrency is not Parallelism". Waza conference, 11 January
2012. Retrieved from http://talks.golang.org/2012/waza.slide (slides) and
http://vimeo.com/49718712 (video).
4. "Parallelism vs. Concurrency" (https://wiki.haskell.org/Parallelism_vs._Concurrency).
Haskell Wiki.
5. Schneider, Fred B. (1997-05-06). On Concurrent Programming (https://archive.org/details
/onconcurrentprog0000schn). Springer. ISBN 9780387949420.
6. Ben-Ari, Mordechai (2006). Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming
(2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-321-31283-9.
7. Patterson & Hennessy 2013, p. 503.
8. Lamport, Leslie (1 September 1979). "How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer That
Correctly Executes Multiprocess Programs". IEEE Transactions on Computers. C-28 (9):
690–691. doi:10.1109/TC.1979.1675439 (https://doi.org/10.1109%2FTC.1979.1675439).
S2CID 5679366 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:5679366).
9. "PODC Influential Paper Award: 2002" (http://www.podc.org/influential/2002.html),
ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, retrieved 2009-08-24
10. Armstrong, Joe (2003). "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of
software errors" (http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:9492/FULLTEXT01.pdf)
(PDF).
11. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/header/thread
12. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/header/coroutine
13. Marlow, Simon (2013) Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell : Techniques for
Multicore and Multithreaded Programming ISBN 9781449335946
14. https://juliacon.talkfunnel.com/2015/21-concurrent-and-parallel-programming-in-julia
Concurrent and Parallel programming in Julia
15. "Concurrency" (https://docs.perl6.org/language/concurrency). docs.perl6.org. Retrieved
2017-12-24.
16. Documentation » The Python Standard Library » Concurrent Execution (https://docs.pyt
hon.org/3/library/concurrency.html)
17. Blum, Ben (2012). "Typesafe Shared Mutable State" (http://winningraceconditions.blog
spot.com/2012/09/rust-4-typesafe-shared-mutable-state.html). Retrieved 2012-11-14.
18. "Concurrency" (https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/LanguageGuide/Concurrency.html).
2022. Retrieved 2022-12-15.
Sources
▪ Patterson, David A.; Hennessy, John L. (2013). Computer Organization and Design: The
Hardware/Software Interface. The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture
and Design (5 ed.). Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 978-0-12407886-4.
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Further reading
▪ Dijkstra, E. W. (1965). "Solution of a problem in concurrent programming control" (http
s://doi.org/10.1145%2F365559.365617). Communications of the ACM. 8 (9): 569.
doi:10.1145/365559.365617 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F365559.365617).
S2CID 19357737 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:19357737).
▪ Herlihy, Maurice (2008) [2008]. The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. Morgan
Kaufmann. ISBN 978-0123705914.
▪ Downey, Allen B. (2005) [2005]. The Little Book of Semaphores (https://web.archive.org/w
eb/20160304031330/http://www.greenteapress.com/semaphores/downey08semaphor
es.pdf) (PDF). Green Tea Press. ISBN 978-1-4414-1868-5. Archived from the original (htt
p://www.greenteapress.com/semaphores/downey08semaphores.pdf) (PDF) on
2016-03-04. Retrieved 2009-11-21.
▪ Filman, Robert E.; Daniel P. Friedman (1984). Coordinated Computing: Tools and
Techniques for Distributed Software (https://archive.org/details/coordinatedcompu0000fi
lm/page/370). New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 370 (https://archive.org/details/coordinatedco
mpu0000film/page/370). ISBN 978-0-07-022439-1.
▪ Leppäjärvi, Jouni (2008). A pragmatic, historically oriented survey on the universality of
synchronization primitives (http://www.enseignement.polytechnique.fr/informatique/IN
F431/X09-2010-2011/AmphiTHC/SynchronizationPrimitives.pdf) (PDF). University of
Oulu.
▪ Taubenfeld, Gadi (2006). Synchronization Algorithms and Concurrent Programming (htt
p://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/gadi/book.htm). Pearson / Prentice Hall. p. 433.
ISBN 978-0-13-197259-9.
External links
▪ Media related to Concurrent programming at Wikimedia Commons
▪ Concurrent Systems Virtual Library (https://web.archive.org/web/20060128114620/htt
p://vl.fmnet.info/concurrent/)
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