DC: A Deterministic, Deadlock-free Concurrent Programming Model

The advent of multicore processors has made concurrent programming models mandatory. However, most concurrent programming models come with a repertoire of problems. The two major ones are non-determinism and deadlocks. By determinism, we mean the output behavior of the program is independent of the interleaving caused by the schedule and depends only on the input behavior. A few concurrent models provide deterministic behavior by providing constructs like barriers and locks that impose additional synchronization, but the incorrect usage of these constructs leads to problems like deadlocks. In this paper, we propose DC, a new programming model that guarantees the two desirable properties of concurrency determinism and deadlock-freedom. Any program in this model will be deterministic; the output of the program will solely depend on the input and not on the interleaving of the tasks in the program. Additionally, the model cannot introduce deadlocks. We prove the correctness of our model and evaluate it with a set of examples. Keywords-Determinism, Deadlock-Freedom