Lock-free programming is a well-known technique for multithreaded programming. Lock-free programming is a way to share changing data among several threads without paying the cost of acquiring and releasing locks. On practice, parallel programming models must include scalable concurrent algorithms and patterns. Lock-free programming patterns play an important role in scalability. This paper is d...

The fastest and most effective way for a company to realize maximum profit is to get its pricing right. The right price can boost profit faster than increasing volume will; the wrong price can shrink it just as quickly. Yet many otherwise tough-minded managers miss out on significant profits because they shy away from pricing decisions for fear that they will alienate their customers. Worse, if...

Soft, pneumatic actuators that buckle when interior pressure is less than exterior provide a new mechanism of actuation. Upon application of negative pneumatic pressure, elastic beam elements in these actuators undergo reversible, cooperative collapse, and generate a rotational motion. These actuators are inexpensive to fabricate, lightweight, easy to control, and safe to operate. They can be u...

In the last fteen years, lock managers for regular disk-based database systems have seen little change. This is not without reason, since traditional memory-resident lock managers have always been much faster than disk-based database storage managers and disk-based database systems had few alternative design options. However, the introduction of memory-resident database systems has created both...

A versatile, low-cost, digital signal processor (DSP) based lock-in module with external reference is described. This module is used to implement an industrial spectrophotometer for measuring spectral transmission and reflection of automotive and architectonic coating glasses over the ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared wavelength range. The light beams are modulated with an optical chopper....

The exibility of nested transactions is generally provided at the expenses of a more complex locking mechanism which must deal with expensive lock inheritance. In this paper, we give a solution for eecient lock inheritance. Our solution does not change the original nested transaction model but does revisit its locking rules using set-oriented semantics. This allows us to trade the cost of lock ...

Fine-grained lock protocols with lock modes and lock granules adjusted to the various XML processing models, allow for highly concurrent transaction processing on XML trees, but require locking facilities that efficiently support large and deep hierarchies with varying fan-out characteristics. We discuss these and also further requirements like prefix-based node labels, and present a lock manag...