Relativistic programming
Encyclopedia
Relativistic programming (RP) is a style of concurrent programming where instead of trying to avoid conflicts between readers and writers (or writers and writers in some cases) the algorithm is designed to tolerate them and get a correct result regardless of the order of events. Also relativistic programming algorithms are designed to work without the presences of a global order of events. That is, there may be some cases where one thread sees a two events in a different order than another thread (hence the term relativistic because in Einstein's relativity
order of events is not always the same to different viewers).
Relativistic programming provides advantages in performance compared to other concurrency paradigms because it does not require one thread to wait for another nearly as often. Because of this, forms of it (Read-Copy-Update
for instance) are now used extensively in the Linux kernel
(more than 5,000 times ).
Special relativity
Special relativity is the physical theory of measurement in an inertial frame of reference proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".It generalizes Galileo's...
order of events is not always the same to different viewers).
Relativistic programming provides advantages in performance compared to other concurrency paradigms because it does not require one thread to wait for another nearly as often. Because of this, forms of it (Read-Copy-Update
Read-copy-update
In computer operating systems, read-copy-update is a synchronization mechanism implementing a kind of mutual exclusionPlease note that RCU does not implement mutual exclusion in the conventional sense: RCU readers can and do run concurrently with RCU updates...
for instance) are now used extensively in the Linux kernel
Linux kernel
The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software....
(more than 5,000 times ).
External links
- Relativistic Programming at Portland State UniversityPortland State UniversityPortland State University is a public state urban university located in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1946, it has the largest overall enrollment of any university in the state of Oregon, including undergraduate and graduate students. It is also the only public university in...