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In computer science, a concurrent data structure is a particular way of storing and organizing data for access by multiple computing threads (or processes) on a computer. Historically, such data structures were used on uniprocessor machines with operating systems that supported multiple computing threads (or processes). The term concurrency captured the multiplexing/interleaving of the threads' operations on the data by the operating system, even though the processors never issued two operations that accessed the data simultaneously. Today, as multiprocessor computer architectures that provide parallelism become the dominant computing platform (through the proliferation of multi-core processors), the term has come to stand mainly for data structures that can be accessed by multiple threads which may actually access the data simultaneously because they run on different processors that communicate with one another. The concurrent data structure (sometimes also called a ''shared data structure'') is usually considered to reside in an abstract storage environment called shared memory, though this memory may be physically implemented as either a "tightly coupled" or a distributed collection of storage modules. ==Basic principles== Concurrent data structures, intended for use in parallel or distributed computing environments, differ from "sequential" data structures, intended for use on a uni-processor machine, in several ways .〔 〕 Most notably, in a sequential environment one specifies the data structure's properties and checks that they are implemented correctly, by providing safety properties. In a concurrent environment, the specification must also describe liveness properties which an implementation must provide. Safety properties usually state that something bad never happens, while liveness properties state that something good keeps happening. These properties can be expressed, for example, using Linear Temporal Logic. The type of liveness requirements tend to define the data structure. The method calls can be blocking or non-blocking. Data structures are not restricted to one type or the other, and can allow combinations where some method calls are blocking and others are non-blocking (examples can be found in the Java concurrency software library). The safety properties of concurrent data structures must capture their behavior given the many possible interleavings of methods called by different threads. It is quite intuitive to specify how abstract data structures behave in a sequential setting in which there are no interleavings. Therefore, many mainstream approaches for arguing the safety properties of a concurrent data structure (such as serializability, linearizability, sequential consistency, and quiescent consistency 〔) specify the structures properties sequentially, and map its concurrent executions to a collection of sequential ones. In order to guarantee the safety and liveness properties, concurrent data structures must typically (though not always) allow threads to reach consensus as to the results of their simultaneous data access and modification requests. To support such agreement, concurrent data structures are implemented using special primitive synchronization operations (see synchronization primitives) available on modern multiprocessor machines that allow multiple threads to reach consensus. This consensus can be achieved in a blocking manner by using locks, or without locks, in which case it is non-blocking. There is a wide body of theory on the design of concurrent data structures (see bibliographical references). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Concurrent data structure」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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