This book is devoted to the most difficult part of concurrent programming, namely synchronization concepts, techniques and principles when the cooperating entities are asynchronous, communicate through a shared memory, and may experience failures. Synchronization is no longer a set of tricks but, due to research results in recent decades, it relies today on sane scientific foundations as explained in this book. In this book the author explains synchronization and the implementation of concurrent objects, presenting in a uniform and comprehensive way the major theoretical and practical results of the past 30 years. Among the key features of the book are a new look at lock-based synchronization (mutual exclusion, semaphores, monitors, path expressions); an introduction to the atomicity consistency criterion and its properties and a specific chapter on transactional memory; an introduction to mutex-freedom and associated progress conditions such as obstruction-freedom and wait-freedom; a presentation of Lamport's hierarchy of safe, regular and atomic registers and associated wait-free constructions; a description of numerous wait-free constructions of concurrent objects (queues, stacks, weak counters, snapshot objects, renaming objects, etc.); a presentation of the computability power of concurrent objects including the notions of universal construction, consensus number and the associated Herlihy's hierarchy; and a survey of failure detector-based constructions of consensus objects. The book is suitable for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students in computer science or computer engineering, graduate students in mathematics interested in the foundations of process synchronization, and practitioners and engineers who need to produce correct concurrent software. The reader should have a basic knowledge of algorithms and operating systems.

Mathematics of Computing -- Parallelism.

Mathematics of Computing -- Parallelism.

Theory is what remains true when technology is changing. So, it is important to know and master the basic concepts and the theoretical tools that underlie the design of the systems we are using today and the systems we will use tomorrow. This means that, given a computing model, we need to know what can be done and what cannot be done in that model. Considering systems built on top of an asynchronous read/write shared memory prone to process crashes, this monograph presents and develops the fundamental notions that are universal constructions, consensus numbers, distributed recursivity, power of the BG simulation, and what can be done when one has to cope with process anonymity and/or memory anonymity. Numerous distributed algorithms are presented, the aim of which is being to help the reader better understand the power and the subtleties of the notions that are presented. In addition, the reader can appreciate the simplicity and beauty of some of these algorithms.

The first textbook that focuses purely on Synchronization - a fundamental challenge in Computer Science that is fast becoming a major performance and design issue for concurrent programming on modern architectures, and for the design of distributed systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing, ICA3PP 2016, held in Granada, Spain, in December 2016. The 30 full papers and 22 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 117 submissions. They cover many dimensions of parallel algorithms and architectures, encompassing fundamental theoretical approaches, practical experimental projects, and commercial components and systems trying to push beyond the limits of existing technologies, including experimental efforts, innovative systems, and investigations that identify weaknesses in existing parallel processing technology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Euro-Par 2015, held in Vienna, Austria, in August 2015. The 51 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 190 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: support tools and environments; performance modeling, prediction and evaluation; scheduling and load balancing; architecture and compilers; parallel and distributed data management; grid, cluster and cloud computing; distributed systems and algorithms; parallel and distributed programming, interfaces and languages; multi- and many-core programming; theory and algorithms for parallel computation; numerical methods and applications; and accelerator computing.