Document Type

Technical Report

Publication Date

1987-09-01

Filename

WUCS-87-26.pdf

Technical Report Number

WUCS-87-26

Abstract

This report introduces a new parallel computation model that is suitable for pursuit of large scale concurrency. Our goal is to develop a semantically clean paradigm for distributed computation with fine-grained parallelism. Our approach is to demote the notion of process as the key concept in organizing large scale parallel computation. We promote, instead, the notion of transaction, an anonymous atomic action void of internal state, as the basic element of computation. We propose to organize a computation as a network, called a transaction net, of databases connected by transactions. A transaction, when it is fired, consumes data objects from source databases and produces data objects in target databases as an atomic action. A transaction net is akin to a Petrich net, where the token, the place, and the transition corresponds to the data, the database and the transaction, respectively. The state of computation is represented by the data state without the control state. An informal definition of the model is given, and solutions for well known programming problems such as sorting, transitive closure, Hamiltonean circuit, shortest path, and the eight queen's problem.

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Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7C53J5C

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