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A Strict occam Design Tool

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Abstract

This paper presents a graphical design tool for the construction of multiprocess systems that are guaranteed free from deadlock, livelock and starvation. The tool is strictly targeted to implementations based upon the CSP/occam synchronised message passing model, which includes systems programmed in Occam itself, various parallel extensions to C (originally developed for the transputer), SuperPascal and a subset of MPI. The tool implements a mix of design paradigms whose synchronisation properties are well-behaved and easy to analyse, allowing only safe process networks to be built. The Occam binding of the tool provides further guarantees against ‘thread-unsafe’ designs that are derived directly from the language. This paper gives the background to the work1, the design tool methodology and an example of its use.

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag London Limited

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Beckett, D., Welch, P. (1996). A Strict occam Design Tool. In: Jesshope, C., Shafarenko, S. (eds) UK Parallel ’96. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1504-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1504-5_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76068-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-1504-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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