The mutual-exclusion property of locks stands in the way to scalability of parallel programs on many-core architectures. Locks do not allow progress guarantees, because a task may fail inside a critical section and keep holding a lock that blocks other tasks from accessing shared data. With non-blocking synchronization, the drawbacks of locks are avoided by synchronizing access to shared data b...

When a clinical dose of a competitive neuromuscular blocking drug is given I.V. to a patient, a period of latency is followed by a progressive onset of blockade until a maximum is reached after several minutes. Thereafter, the intensity of block declines gradually. The precise relationship between the dose of drug and the time-course of the effect is complex, being dependent upon both pharmacok...

We explore techniques for designing nonblocking algorithms that do not require advance knowledge of the number of threads that participate, whose time complexity and space consumption both adapt to various measures (rather than being based on predefined worst-case scenarios), and that can continue to reclaim memory even after thread failures. The techniques we introduce can be implemented using...

This thesis deals with how to design and implement efficient, practical and reliable concurrent data structures. The design method using mutual exclusion incurs serious drawbacks, whereas the alternative non-blocking techniques avoid those problems and also admit improved parallelism. However, designing non-blocking algorithms is a very complex task, and a majority of the algorithms in the lite...

A database schema should be able to evolve to reflect changes to the universe it represents. In existing systems, user transactions get blocked during complex schema transformations. Blocking user transactions is not an option in systems with very high availability requirements, like operational telecom databases. A non-blocking transformation framework is therefore needed. A method for perform...

28 29 The GLUT1 transporter has become an attractive target to block glucose uptake in malignant cells 30 since most cancer cells overexpress GLUT1 and are sensitive to glucose deprivation. Methylxanthines 31 are natural compounds that inhibit glucose uptake; however, the mechanism of inhibition remains 32 unknown. Here, we use a combination of binding and glucose transport kinetic assays to an...

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This paper presents communication strategies for supporting efficient non-blocking Java communication on clusters. The communication performance is critical for the overall cluster performance. It is possible to use non-blocking communications to reduce the communication overhead. Previous efforts to efficiently support non-blocking communication in Java have led to the introduction of the Java...

Most embedded systems are designed to perform one or fewer specific functions. It is important that the hardware and the software must closely interact to achieve maximum efficiency in all of these realms and overcome the drawbacks found in each aspect. This research focuses on designing a totally new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) as well as hardware that can closely tie together with the ...