CONCURRENCY CONUNDRUMS: An Ontological Solution?

摘要

The arrival of a new era of programming, where developers must consider the subtitles of concurrency inherent in modern many-core architectures, calls for a revamping ranging from fundamental pedagogical processes to software development tools. The problem here is twofold: (1) corresponding real-world scenarios, commonly leveraged in pedagogical practices, contain implicit relationships that are significantly harder to explicitly anticipate in complex code-bases, and (2) the growing plethora of parallel programming language mechanisms collectively blur and distort the common core entities and relationships involved. As a possible solution, this paper proposes a general ontology for reasoning through concurrency conundrums at both high and low levels. The entities and relationships are originally established based on real-world scenarios presented to a group of grade seven students. The ontology is further developed, and implicit relationships revealed, based on an analysis student observations. The ontology is further developed and implicit relationships revealed. The goal of this work is form a basis for cognitive support that will map equally well to both generalized real-world scenarios and detailed code in different programming languages.