Concurrency: State Models and Java Programs

Chapter 11. Concurrent Architectures

The term architecture is used in this chapter to mean the process structure of a concurrent program together with the way in which the elements of the program interact. For example, the client–server architecture of Chapter 10 is a structure consisting of one or more client processes interacting with a single server process. The interaction is bi-directional consisting of a request from a client to the server and a reply from the server to the client. This organization is at the heart of many distributed computing applications. The client–server architecture can be described independently of the detailed operation of client and server processes. We do not need to consider the service provided by the server or indeed the use the client makes of the result obtained from requesting the service. In describing the concurrent architecture of a program, we can ignore many of the details concerned with the application that the program is designed to implement. The advantage of studying architecture is that we can examine concurrent program structures that can be used in many different situations and applications. In the following, we look at some architectures that commonly occur in concurrent programs.

Filter Pipeline

A filter is a process that receives a stream of input values, performs some computation on these values and sends a stream of results as its output. In general, a filter can have more than one input stream and produce results on more than ...