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Co-ordinated Atomic Actions: From Concept to Implementation

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Brian RandellORCiD, Emeritus Professor Alexander RomanovskyORCiD, Dr Robert Stroud, Avelino Zorzo

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Abstract

The Co-ordinated Atomic Action (or CA action) concept is a unified scheme for co-ordinating complex concurrent activities and supporting error recovery between multiple interacting objects in a distributed object-oriented system. It provides a conceptual framework for dealing with different kinds of concurrency and achieving fault tolerance by extending and integrating two complementary concepts - conversations and transactions. Conversations (enhanced with concurrent exception handling) are used to control co-operative concurrency and to implement co-ordinated error recovery whilst transactions are used to maintain the consistency of shared resources in the presence of failures and competitive concurrency. This paper explains the CA action concept in detail and then addresses related design issues such as multi-thread co-ordination, exception handling and resolution, co-ordinated access to shared objects and provision of software fault tolerance. Finally, brief details are given of a number of experimental prototype implementations and case studies.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Randell B, Romanovsky A, Stroud RJ, Xu J, Zorzo AF

Publication type: Report

Publication status: Published

Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series

Year: 1997

Pages: 42

Report Number: 595

Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne

URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/595.pdf


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