Toward a definition of and linguistic support for partial quiescence

Abstract

The global quiescence of a distributed computation (or distributed termination detection) is an important problem. Some concurrent programming languages and systems provide global quiescence detection as a built-in feature so that programmers do not need to write special synchronization code to detect quiescence. This paper introduces partial quiescence (PQ), which generalizes quiescence detection to a specified part of a distributed computation. Partial quiescence is useful, for example, when two independent concurrent computations that both rely on global quiescence need to be combined into a single program. The paper describes how we have designed and implemented a PQ mechanism within an experimental version of the JR concurrent programming language. Our early results are promising qualitatively and quantitatively. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.