Panini: Reconciling Concurrency and Modularity in Design

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2010-03-25
Authors
Long, Yuheng
Mooney, Sean
Sondag, Tyler
Rajan, Hridesh
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Rajan, Hridesh
Professor and Department Chair of Computer Science
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Computer Science

Computer Science—the theory, representation, processing, communication and use of information—is fundamentally transforming every aspect of human endeavor. The Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University advances computational and information sciences through; 1. educational and research programs within and beyond the university; 2. active engagement to help define national and international research, and 3. educational agendas, and sustained commitment to graduating leaders for academia, industry and government.

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The Computer Science Department was officially established in 1969, with Robert Stewart serving as the founding Department Chair. Faculty were composed of joint appointments with Mathematics, Statistics, and Electrical Engineering. In 1969, the building which now houses the Computer Science department, then simply called the Computer Science building, was completed. Later it was named Atanasoff Hall. Throughout the 1980s to present, the department expanded and developed its teaching and research agendas to cover many areas of computing.

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1969-present

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Abstract

Writing correct and efficient concurrent programs still remains a challenge. Explicit concurrency is difficult, error prone, and creates code which is hard to maintain and debug. This type of concurrency also treats modular program design and concurrency as separate goals, where modularity often suffers. To solve these problems, we are designing a new language that we call panini. In this paper, we focus on panini's asynchronous, typed events which reconcile the modularity goal promoted by the implicit invocation design style with the concurrency goal of exposing potential concurrency between the execution of subjects and observers. Since modularity is improved and concurrency is implicit in panini, programs are easy to reason about and maintain. Furthermore, races and deadlocks are avoided entirely yielding programs with a guaranteed sequential semantics. To evaluate our language design and implementation we show several examples of its usage as well as an empirical study of program performance. We found that not only is developing and understanding panini programs significantly easier compared to standard concurrent object-oriented programs, but performance of panini programs is comparable to the equivalent programs written using Java's fork-join framework.

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