In computer science, mutual exclusion is a property of concurrency control, which is instituted for the purpose of preventing race conditions. It is the requirement that one thread of execution never enters a critical section while a concurrent thread of execution is already accessing said critical section, which refers to an interval of time during which a thread of execution accesses a shared resource or shared memory.
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing. His work earned him the Turing Award, usually regarded as the highest distinction in computer science, in 1980.
Leslie B. Lamport is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual.
Per Brinch Hansen was a Danish-American computer scientist known for his work in operating systems, concurrent programming and parallel and distributed computing.
In computer science, concurrency is the ability of different parts or units of a program, algorithm, or problem to be executed out-of-order or in partial order, without affecting the outcome. This allows for parallel execution of the concurrent units, which can significantly improve overall speed of the execution in multi-processor and multi-core systems. In more technical terms, concurrency refers to the decomposability of a program, algorithm, or problem into order-independent or partially-ordered components or units of computation.
A Byzantine fault is a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine generals problem", developed to describe a situation in which, to avoid catastrophic failure of the system, the system's actors must agree on a concerted strategy, but some of these actors are unreliable.
The Larch Prover, or LP for short, is an interactive theorem proving system for multi-sorted first-order logic. It was used at MIT and elsewhere during the 1990s to reason about designs for circuits, concurrent algorithms, hardware, and software.
A vector clock is a data structure used for determining the partial ordering of events in a distributed system and detecting causality violations. Just as in Lamport timestamps, inter-process messages contain the state of the sending process's logical clock. A vector clock of a system of N processes is an array/vector of N logical clocks, one clock per process; a local "largest possible values" copy of the global clock-array is kept in each process.
Barbara Liskov is an American computer scientist who has made pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing. Her notable work includes the introduction of abstract data types and the accompanying principle of data abstraction, along with the Liskov substitution principle, which applies these ideas to object-oriented programming, subtyping, and inheritance. Her work was recognized with the 2008 Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science.
David Gries is an American computer scientist at Cornell University, United States mainly known for his books The Science of Programming (1981) and A Logical Approach to Discrete Math.
Maurice Peter Herlihy is a computer scientist active in the field of multiprocessor synchronization. Herlihy has contributed to areas including theoretical foundations of wait-free synchronization, linearizable data structures, applications of combinatorial topology to distributed computing, as well as hardware and software transactional memory. He is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1994.
Kanianthra Mani Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He has been the Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice, and he has been a professor at Caltech since 1989. He also served as Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology.
Orc is a concurrent, nondeterministic computer programming language created by Jayadev Misra at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Chandy–Misra–Haas algorithm resource model checks for deadlock in a distributed system. It was developed by K. Mani Chandy, Jayadev Misra and Laura M Haas.
Michel Raynal is a French informatics scientist, professor at IRISA, University of Rennes, France. He is known for his contributions in the fields of algorithms, computability, and fault-tolerance in the context of concurrent and distributed systems. Michel Raynal is also Distinguished Chair professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and editor of the “Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory” published by Morgan & Claypool. He is a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France and a member of Academia Europaea.
Robert Eliot Shostak is an American computer scientist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He is most noted academically for his seminal work in the branch of distributed computing known as Byzantine Fault Tolerance. He is also known for co-authoring the Paradox Database, and most recently, the founding of Vocera Communications, a company that makes wearable, Star Trek-like communication badges.
In computer science, interference freedom is a technique for proving partial correctness of concurrent programs with shared variables. Hoare logic had been introduced earlier to prove correctness of sequential programs. In her PhD thesis under advisor David Gries, Susan Owicki extended this work to apply to concurrent programs.
