Computer Science Technical Reports
CS at VT

Instructional Footprinting: A Model for Exploiting Concurrency through Instructional Decomposition and Code Motion

Landry, Kenneth D. and Arthur, James D. (1992) Instructional Footprinting: A Model for Exploiting Concurrency through Instructional Decomposition and Code Motion. Technical Report TR-92-35, Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

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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 as 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 or 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 instructions. This paper presents research findings that entail the development of the instructional footprint model, an algorithmic framework in which to exploit concurrency in programming languages, and some preliminary results from applying the instructional footprint model.

Item Type:Departmental Technical Report
Subjects:Computer Science > Historical Collection(Till Dec 2001)
ID Code:315
Deposited By:User autouser
Deposited On:05 December 2001