Software Systems Architecture: Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives, Second Edition

19. The Concurrency Viewpoint

Historically, information systems were designed to operate with little or no concurrency, running via batch mode on large central computers. However, a number of factors (including distributed systems, increasing workloads, and cheap multiprocessor hardware) have combined so that today’s information systems often have little or no batch processing and are inherently concurrent.

In contrast, control systems have always been inherently concurrent and event-driven, given their need to react to external events in order to perform control operations. It is natural, then, that as information systems become more concurrent ...