1 INTRODUCTION This paper addresses the problem of coordinating a team of software developers concurrently working on a common software system. The standard approach to coordinate concurrent activities on a common set of data is locking. Any part of data used by one person is locked against concurrent use by another person. The second person has to wait until the first person has finished his o...

To investigate cognitive operations underlying sequential problem solving, we confronted ten Goffin's cockatoos with a baited box locked by five different inter-locking devices. Subjects were either naïve or had watched a conspecific demonstration, and either faced all devices at once or incrementally. One naïve subject solved the problem without demonstration and with all locks present within ...

Transactional memory (TM) promises to simplify multithreaded programming. Transactions provide mutual exclusion without the possibility of deadlock and the need to assign locks to data structures. To date, most investigations of transactional memory have looked at purely transactional systems that do not interact with legacy code using locks. Unfortunately, the reality of software engineering i...

Atomic sections guarantee atomic and isolated execution of a block of code. Transactional Memory can be used to implement them but suffers from the inability to support system calls and has high overhead. Lock inference is a pessimistic alternative that infers the locks necessary to prevent thread interference. Our research looks at lock inference techniques for Java programs. An important aspe...

Concurrent object-oriented systems must prevent the interference that may arise when multiple threads simultaneously access shared components. We present a simple approach for implementing flexible locking strategies in an object-oriented system, in which the components themselves may be composite objects. We express exclusion requirements as sets of conflict pairs on component interfaces. Give...

When a process attempts to acquire a mutex lock, it may be forced to wait if another process currently holds the lock. In certain applications, such as real-time operating systems and databases, indefinite waiting can cause a process to miss an important deadline [20]. Hence, there has been research on designing abortable mutual exclusion locks, and fairly efficient algorithms of O(log n) RMR c...

As eXtensible Markup Language (XML) provides a capability for describing data structures, and can accommodate many kinds of semistructured data. The semistructured data format is flexible for changing data structures through insertion and deletion of data elements in mission-critical applications. In the case of concurrently changing such a data format, this flexibility could be endangered by a...