Instructional Footprinting: A Basis for Exploiting Concurrency Through Instructional Decomposition and Code Motion: A Research Prospectus

Landry, Kenneth D. and Arthur, James D. (1992) Instructional Footprinting: A Basis for Exploiting Concurrency Through Instructional Decomposition and Code Motion: A Research Prospectus. Technical Report TR-92-33, Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Abstract

In many languages, the programmer is provided the capability of communicating, through the use of function calls, with other, separate, independent processes. This capability can be simple, as a service request made to the operating system, or more advanced, as Tuple space operations specific to a Linda programming system. The problem with such calls, however, is that they block while waiting for data of information to be returned. This synchronous nature and lack of concurrency can be avoided by initiating the request for data earlier in the code and retrieving the returned data later when it is needed. In order to facilitate this concurrency of processing, an instructional footprint model is developed which formally describes movement of instruction. This paper presents a proposal for research that involves the development of the instructional footprint model and an algorithmic framework in which to exploit concurrency in programming languages.