A personal perspective on concurrency

Abstract

This talk will describe a view of concurrency, the author's own, as it has evolved since the late 1970s. Early notions of concurrency were intimately tied with physical hardware and speeding up of computations, which proved to be an impediment to the development of a logical theory of concurrency. In collaboration with K. Mani Chandy, the author developed a theory called UNITY that combined a programming notation with a verification logic to describe a large class of fundamental concurrent algorithms arising in operating systems, communication protocols and distributed systems. Several model checkers, including Murphi, developed by David Dill, are based on UNITY.