Sather, a parallel object-oriented programming language developed at ICSI, offers advanced thread synchronization constructs separating locking mechanism and policies. While a lock management system provides a general locking mechanism, synchronization objects define and implement different extensible policies. Commonly used synchronization objects such as mutual exclusion and reader/writer loc...

The necessity to write concurrent programs is increasing as systems are getting more complex while processor speed increases are slowing down. The current popular solution for parallel programming is to use locks but they contain many known drawbacks that make them a suboptimal solution. Transactional memory is a recent alternative to locks that is gaining a lot of attention in the research com...

Most ancient Chinese padlocks are key-operated locks with splitting springs, and partially keyless letter-combination locks. They can be characterized based on the types of locks, the shapes of locks, the engravings of locks, the materials of locks, and the mechanisms of locks. Some locks and keys are not only very beautiful and artistic colorful, but also with various designs. As a result, a s...

Reentrant locking is a recursive locking mechanism which allows a thread in a multi-threaded program to acquire the reentrant lock multiple times. The thread must release this lock an equal number of times before another thread can acquire this lock. We consider the control state reachability problem for recursive multi-threaded programs synchronizing via a finite number of reentrant locks. Suc...

Operating Systems have offered Locking as a de-facto mechanism for mutual exclusion. Locks have enjoyed widespread use due to their simplicity. However the burden of protecting a critical section is left to the programmer. Programmer has to ensure that the Locks are created, acquired, released and destroyed after use. Incorrect use of Locks can lead to race conditions. In Multi-programming, par...