2019•Unpublished venueRequires access

The mutual exclusion problem: part I---A theory of interprocess communication

Leslie Lamport

Open publisher page 14 citations

Abstract

A novel formal theory of concurrent systems that does not assume any atomic operations is introduced. The execution of a concurrent program is modeled as an abstract set of operation executions with two temporal ordering relations: "precedence" and "can causally affect". A primitive interprocess communication mechanism is then defined. In Part II, the mutual exclusion is expressed precisely in terms of this model, and solutions using the communication mechanism are given.

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What this paper is about

A novel formal theory of concurrent systems that does not assume any atomic operations is introduced. The execution of a concurrent program is modeled as an abstract set of operation executions with two temporal ordering relations: "precedence" and "can causally affect". A primitive interprocess communication mechanism is then defined. In Part II, the mutual exclusion is expressed precisely in terms of this model, and solutions using the communication mechanism are given.

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OpenAlex reports 14 citations for this work. Citation counts describe recorded attention and do not establish research quality.

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Available abstract

A novel formal theory of concurrent systems that does not assume any atomic operations is introduced. The execution of a concurrent program is modeled as an abstract set of operation executions with two temporal ordering relations: "precedence" and "can causally affect". A primitive interprocess communication mechanism is then defined. In Part II, the mutual exclusion is expressed precisely in terms of this model, and solutions using the communication mechanism are given.

Key concepts: Mutual exclusion, Inter-process communication, Computer science, Mechanism (biology), Distributed computing, Set (abstract data type), Theoretical computer science, Programming language

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