Saint Louis , MO 63130 - 4899 One Brookings Drive Campus Box 1045 Washington University Department of Computer Science

The arguments against centralized solutions focus on the performance bottleneck associated with a single central uniprocessor having a limited throughput and, possibly, a small number of ports. These limitations can be overcome to some extent if the central processor is replaced by a modern SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) machine. Several orders of magnitude gains in parallelism are thus achievable while maintaining the logical simplicity of a centralized control. We call such a scheme parallel synchronous control (PSC). In this paper, we explore this approach by presenting a PSC solution to the classical dining philosophers problem. The PSC solution is derived directly from a fair centralized solution without needing reverification.