International Travel Support for Research in Resilient Parallel Computation: University of Paris, France: Oct- Dec 1992

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The investigators propose to develop theoretical foundations for automatic and efficient methods to translate programs written for ideal abstract shared-memory parallel machines to programs for more realistic (but still abstract) parallel machines. "Realistic" in this context means that components of the machines may suffer failures or that different components may execute at different speeds. The first step in the translation is to divide the parallel program written for the ideal abstract machine into fragments whose different portions do not interfere with one another. Each such program fragment will be transformed to a program on the more realistic machine, which executes the fragment fast but only "tentatively"; that is, the result is correct only with high probability. Then the realistic machine checks whether the tentative computation was correct. If so, the fragment has completed its execution, otherwise its effects will be undone and it will be re-executed. Algorithmic ideas are drawn from the literature on randomization and transaction processing. The significance of the proposed work is that many algorithms have been developed for ideal shared-memory parallel machines, since they are easy to program and understand. The success of the research will contribute to the theoretical foundation of the automatic translation of such algorithms to programs executing efficiently on more realistic machines.