A definition of and linguistic support for partial quiescence

Note to editor and reviewers: This paper is based on our earlier paper (Reference [1]), which appeared in the Euro-Par 2006 conference. The present paper extends that earlier paper with additional details about our overall approach, more examples, further experimental results, and additional discussion. SUMMARY The global quiescence of a distributed computation (or distributed termination detection) is an important problem. Some concurrent programming languages and systems provide global quiescence detection as a built-in feature so that programmers do not need to write special synchronization code to detect quiescence. This paper introduces partial quiescence (PQ), which generalizes quiescence detection to a specified part of a distributed computation. Partial quiescence is useful, for example, when two independent concurrent computations that both rely on global quiescence need to be combined into a single program. The paper describes how we have designed and implemented a PQ mechanism within an experimental version of the JR concurrent programming language, and have gained experience with several representative applications. Our early results are promising qualitatively and quantitatively.