The treatment of state in optimistic systems

  • Authors:
  • David Bruce

  • Affiliations:
  • Defence Research Agency, st. Andrews Road, Malvern, Worcestershire WR14 3PS, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • PADS '95 Proceedings of the ninth workshop on Parallel and distributed simulation
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

Optimistic computation methods typically save copies of objects' state information, so that they can recover from erroneous “over-optimistic” computations. Such state saving is generally time and space consuming, and can be rather complicated both to implement and to use.I show how the data structure community's theory of persistence can be used not only to analyse and explain the treatment of state in optimistic systems, but also as a simple yet general mechanism for performing the necessary state saving with minimal impact on application code.Preliminary results based on a benchmark application and an existing optimistic simulator are presented, showing that providing support for fully general object states is a realistic and practical option. In addition, I show how some existing state saving techniques—including support for shared state—can be derived, and discuss a number of ways in which the model might be extended.