Achieving Asynchronous Speedup While Preserving Synchronous Semantics: An Implementation of Instructional Footprinting in Linda

Landry, Kenneth D. and Arthur, James D. (1993) Achieving Asynchronous Speedup While Preserving Synchronous Semantics: An Implementation of Instructional Footprinting in Linda. Technical Report TR-93-33, Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Abstract

Linda is a coordination language designed to support process creation and inter-process communication within conventional computational languages. Although the Linda paradigm touts architectural and language independence, it often suffers performance penalties, particularly on local area network platforms. Instructional Footprinting is an optimization technique with the primary goal of enhancing the execution speed of Linda programs. The two main aspects of Instructional Footprinting are instructional decomposition and code motion. This paper addresses the semantic issues encountered when the Linda primitives, IN and RD, are decomposed and moved past other Linda operations. Formal semantics are given as well as results showing significant speedup (as high as 64%) when Instructional Footprinting is used.