A distributed event processing method for general purpose computation

Previous proposals for the application of discrete event oriented methods to automatic parallelization have been based on the optimistic execution strategy. In this paper we present a new method which avoids optimistic execution. This is motivated by the observation that the control structure of a conventional program constitutes a temporal coordinate system which is exogenous to the program execution. The method employs a logical time mechanism and provides adaptive synchronisation for the distributed execution. Hence Data dependent and/or conditional parallelism is released without the risk of coherency violation. The paper begins with a brief introduction to Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) paradigm. Efficient coarse grain mapping of conventional programs onto this paradigm is then discussed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.