Shared Queue, Speculation and Digital Circuits

The first thing that I would like to talk about is shared queue. The first aspect is the context in which this could occur. I have come across many graph mining problems which run serially on single units of execution. Parallelizing this process using the shared queue could be an interesting research area to look into. I completely agree with the notion that more complicated constructs could increase the error-rate of the code structure. In the solution, the most important point would be about defining the shared ADT since the rest of the process would depend on it. Again, as Prof.Johnson mentioned in today's class, this paper has a lot of code, and seems to be better written than some of the other patterns that we read earlier. It will be interesting to read more about the choice of nested locks here. The second paper is about speculation. This seemed to me to be the most interesting of the three patterns. The commit/recovery mechanism depending upon the status of a predicate seems to be the most complicated of the tasks mentioned in the paper. I would love to see more elaboration on the recovery mechanism especially on the description of more intelligent recovery mechanism mentioned in the paper. I searched for more information and examples regarding this pattern but I couldnt find that many.

The last paper is about digital circuits pattern. This paper seemed the one requiring the most introspection among the three. Among the examples given, I could relate most to the databases pattern because I have been working on this but not on the scale mentioned in the paper. For most bit level operations that I have encountered in C, I have had to intelligently use up the remaining bits in a word so as to not waste memory. Could we say that bit level parallelism is an 'embarrassingly parallel' problem? Among the examples presented in the paper I found the description of finding the nth gray code to be very interesting. The fitting of data completely as a word is the key aspect here. Overall, I think the three patterns in this set are some of the most introspective that I have read this entire semester.