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SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
4:00 PM - Wean Hall 7500
3:45 PM Distinguished Donuts - Outside the Hall

Dana Scott Distinguished Research Career Award Lecture

John C. Reynolds
Professor of Computer Science
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University

Toward a Grainless Semantics for Shared-Variable Concurrency

Conventional semantics for shared-variable concurrency suffers from the "grain of time" problem, i.e., the necessity of specifying a default level of atomicity. We propose a semantics that avoids any such choice by regarding all interference that is not controlled by explicit critical regions as catastrophic. It is based on three principles:

  • Operations have duration and can overlap one another during execution.
  • If two overlapping operations touch the same location, the meaning of the program execution is "wrong".
  • If, from a given starting state, execution of a program can give "wrong", then no other possibilities need be considered.

Speaker Bio:

John C. Reynolds received a PhD degree (in theoretical physics) from Harvard University in 1961. He has been Assistant and Associate Physicist at Argonne National Laboratory from 1961 to 1970, Professor of Computer Science at Syracuse University from 1970 to 1986, and Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University from 1986 to the present. He has also had temporary appointments at Stanford University, Queen Mary and Westfield College, Edinburgh University, INRIA, Imperial College, Bell Laboratories, and Aarhus University.

He is a member of the IFIP Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology, a former member of Working Group 2.2 on Formal Language Definition, a member of the advisory board of the journal Higher Order and Symbolic Computation, and a former associate editor of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, the Journal of the ACM, and the Communications of the ACM. He is best known for his work on functional languages, polymorphic typing, Algol-like languages, and separation logic. In 2003, he received the SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award.

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