Concurrent computing is a form of computing in which several computations are

executed concurrently—during overlapping time periods—instead of sequentially—with

one completing before the next starts.
This is a property of a system—whether a program, computer, or a network—where
there is a separate execution point or "thread of control" for each process. A
concurrent system is one where a computation can advance without waiting for all
other computations to complete.
Concurrent computing is a form of modular programming. In its paradigm an overall
computation is factored into subcomputations that may be executed concurrently.
Pioneers in the field of concurrent computing include Edsger Dijkstra, Per Brinch
Hansen, and C.A.R. Hoare.

== Introduction ==

The concept of concurrent computing is frequently confused with the related but
distinct concept of parallel computing, although both can be described as "multiple
processes executing during the same period of time". In parallel computing,
execution occurs at the same physical instant: for example, on separate processors
of a multi-processor machine, with the goal of speeding up computations—parallel
computing is impossible on a (one-core) single processor, as only one computation
can occur at any instant (during any single clock cycle). By contrast, concurrent
computing consists of process lifetimes overlapping, but execution does not happen
at the same instant. The goal here is to model processes that happen concurrently,
like multiple clients accessing a server at the same time. Structuring software
systems as composed of multiple concurrent, communicating parts can be useful for
tackling complexity, regardless of whether the parts can be executed in parallel.
For example, concurrent processes can be executed on one core by interleaving the
execution steps of each process via time-sharing slices: only one process runs at a
time, and if it does not complete during its time slice, it is paused, another
process begins or resumes, and then later the original process is resumed. In this
way, multiple processes are part-way through execution at a single instant, but
only one process is being executed at that instant.
Concurrent computations may be executed in parallel, for example, by assigning each
process to a separate processor or processor core, or distributing a computation
across a network.
The exact timing of when tasks in a concurrent system are executed depends on the
scheduling, and tasks need not always be executed concurrently. For example, given
two tasks, T1 and T2:

T1 may be executed and finished before T2 or vice versa (serial and sequential)
T1 and T2 may be executed alternately (serial and concurrent)
T1 and T2 may be executed simultaneously at the same instant of time (parallel and
concurrent)
The word "sequential" is used as an antonym for both "concurrent" and "parallel";
when these are explicitly distinguished, concurrent/sequential and parallel/serial
are used as opposing pairs. A schedule in which tasks execute one at a time
(serially, no parallelism), without interleaving (sequentially, no concurrency: no
task begins until the prior task ends) is called a serial schedule. A set of tasks
that can be scheduled serially is serializable, which simplifies concurrency
control.

=== Coordinating access to shared resources ===

The main challenge in designing concurrent programs is concurrency control:
ensuring the correct sequencing of the interactions or communications between
different computational executions, and coordinating access to resources that are
shared among executions. Potential problems include race conditions, deadlocks, and
resource starvation. For example, consider the following algorithm to make
withdrawals from a checking account represented by the shared resource balance:
Suppose balance = 500, and two concurrent threads make the calls withdraw(300) and
withdraw(350). If line 3 in both operations executes before line 5 both operations
will find that balance >= withdrawal evaluates to true, and execution will proceed
to subtracting the withdrawal amount. However, since both processes perform their
withdrawals, the total amount withdrawn will end up being more than the original
balance. These sorts of problems with shared resources benefit from the use of
concurrency control, or non-blocking algorithms.

=== Advantages ===

There are advantages of concurrent computing:

Increased program throughput—parallel execution of a concurrent algorithm allows

the number of tasks completed in a given time to increase proportionally to the
number of processors according to Gustafson's law.
High responsiveness for input/output—input/output-intensive programs mostly wait
for input or output operations to complete. Concurrent programming allows the time
that would be spent waiting to be used for another task.
More appropriate program structure—some problems and problem domains are well-
suited to representation as concurrent tasks or processes. For example MVCC.

== Models ==
Introduced in 1962, Petri nets were an early attempt to codify the rules of
concurrent execution. Dataflow theory later built upon these, and Dataflow
architectures were created to physically implement the ideas of dataflow theory.
Beginning in the late 1970s, process calculi such as Calculus of Communicating
Systems (CCS) and Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) were developed to permit
algebraic reasoning about systems composed of interacting components. The π-
calculus added the capability for reasoning about dynamic topologies.
Input/output automata were introduced in 1987.
Logics such as Lamport's TLA+, and mathematical models such as traces and Actor
event diagrams, have also been developed to describe the behavior of concurrent
systems.
Software transactional memory borrows from database theory the concept of atomic
transactions and applies them to memory accesses.

=== Consistency models ===

Concurrent programming languages and multiprocessor programs must have a

consistency model (also known as a memory model). The consistency model defines
rules for how operations on computer memory occur and how results are produced.
One of the first consistency models was Leslie Lamport's sequential consistency
model. Sequential consistency is the property of a program that its execution
produces the same results as a sequential program. Specifically, a program is
sequentially consistent if "the results of any execution is the same as if the
operations of all the processors were executed in some sequential order, and the
operations of each individual processor appear in this sequence in the order
specified by its program".

== Implementation ==

A number of different methods can be used to implement concurrent programs, such as

implementing each computational execution as an operating system process, or
implementing the computational processes as a set of threads within a single
operating system process.

=== Interaction and communication ===

In some concurrent computing systems, communication between the concurrent
components is hidden from the programmer (e.g., by using futures), while in others
it must be handled explicitly. Explicit communication can be divided into two
classes:

Shared memory communication

Concurrent components communicate by altering the contents of shared memory
locations (exemplified by Java and C#). This style of concurrent programming
usually needs the use of some form of locking (e.g., mutexes, semaphores, or
monitors) to coordinate between threads. A program that properly implements any of
these is said to be thread-safe.
Message passing communication
Concurrent components communicate by message passing (exchanging messages,
exemplified by MPI, Go, Scala, Erlang and occam). The exchange of messages may be
carried out asynchronously, or may use a synchronous "rendezvous" style in which
the sender blocks until the message is received. Asynchronous message passing may
be reliable or unreliable (sometimes referred to as "send and pray"). Message-
passing concurrency tends to be far easier to reason about than shared-memory
concurrency, and is typically considered a more robust form of concurrent
programming. A wide variety of mathematical theories to understand and analyze
message-passing systems are available, including the actor model, and various
process calculi. Message passing can be efficiently implemented via symmetric
multiprocessing, with or without shared memory cache coherence.
Shared memory and message passing concurrency have different performance
characteristics. Typically (although not always), the per-process memory overhead
and task switching overhead is lower in a message passing system, but the overhead
of message passing is greater than for a procedure call. These differences are
often overwhelmed by other performance factors.

== History ==
Concurrent computing developed out of earlier work on railroads and telegraphy,
from the 19th and early 20th century, and some terms date to this period, such as
semaphores. These arose to address the question of how to handle multiple trains on
the same railroad system (avoiding collisions and maximizing efficiency) and how to
handle multiple transmissions over a given set of wires (improving efficiency),
such as via time-division multiplexing (1870s).
The academic study of concurrent algorithms started in the 1960s, with Dijkstra
(1965) credited with being the first paper in this field, identifying and solving
mutual exclusion.

== Prevalence ==
Concurrency is pervasive in computing, occurring from low-level hardware on a
single chip to worldwide networks. Examples follow.
At the programming language level:

Channel
Coroutine
Futures and promises
At the operating system level:

Computer multitasking, including both cooperative multitasking and preemptive

multitasking
Time-sharing, which replaced sequential batch processing of jobs with concurrent
use of a system
Process
Thread
At the network level, networked systems are generally concurrent by their nature,
as they consist of separate devices.

== Languages supporting concurrent programming ==

Concurrent programming languages are programming languages that use language
constructs for concurrency. These constructs may involve multi-threading, support
for distributed computing, message passing, shared resources (including shared
memory) or futures and promises. Such languages are sometimes described as
concurrency-oriented languages or concurrency-oriented programming languages
(COPL).
Today, the most commonly used programming languages that have specific constructs
for concurrency are Java and C#. Both of these languages fundamentally use a
shared-memory concurrency model, with locking provided by monitors (although
message-passing models can and have been implemented on top of the underlying
shared-memory model). Of the languages that use a message-passing concurrency
model, Erlang was probably the most widely used in industry as of 2010.
Many concurrent programming languages have been developed more as research
languages (e.g., Pict) rather than as languages for production use. However,
languages such as Erlang, Limbo, and occam have seen industrial use at various
times in the last 20 years. A non-exhaustive list of languages which use or provide
concurrent programming facilities:

Ada—general purpose, with native support for message passing and monitor based
concurrency
Alef—concurrent, with threads and message passing, for system programming in early
versions of Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Alice—extension to Standard ML, adds support for concurrency via futures
Ateji PX—extension to Java with parallel primitives inspired from π-calculus
Axum—domain specific, concurrent, based on actor model and .NET Common Language
Runtime using a C-like syntax
BMDFM—Binary Modular DataFlow Machine
C++—thread and coroutine support libraries
Cω (C omega)—for research, extends C#, uses asynchronous communication
C#—supports concurrent computing using lock, yield, also since version 5.0 async
and await keywords introduced
Clojure—modern, functional programming dialect of Lisp on the Java platform
Concurrent Clean—functional programming, similar to Haskell
Concurrent Collections (CnC)—Achieves implicit parallelism independent of memory
model by explicitly defining flow of data and control
Concurrent Haskell—lazy, pure functional language operating concurrent processes on
shared memory
Concurrent ML—concurrent extension of Standard ML
Concurrent Pascal—by Per Brinch Hansen
Curry
D—multi-paradigm system programming language with explicit support for concurrent
programming (actor model)
E—uses promises to preclude deadlocks
ECMAScript—uses promises for asynchronous operations
Eiffel—through its SCOOP mechanism based on the concepts of Design by Contract
Elixir—dynamic and functional meta-programming aware language running on the Erlang
VM.
Erlang—uses synchronous or asynchronous message passing with no shared memory
FAUST—real-time functional, for signal processing, compiler provides automatic
parallelization via OpenMP or a specific work-stealing scheduler
Fortran—coarrays and do concurrent are part of Fortran 2008 standard
Go—for system programming, with a concurrent programming model based on CSP
Haskell—concurrent, and parallel functional programming language
Hume—functional, concurrent, for bounded space and time environments where automata
processes are described by synchronous channels patterns and message passing
Io—actor-based concurrency
Janus—features distinct askers and tellers to logical variables, bag channels; is
purely declarative
Java—thread class or Runnable interface
Julia—"concurrent programming primitives: Tasks, async-wait, Channels."
JavaScript—via web workers, in a browser environment, promises, and callbacks.
JoCaml—concurrent and distributed channel based, extension of OCaml, implements the
join-calculus of processes
Join Java—concurrent, based on Java language
Joule—dataflow-based, communicates by message passing
Joyce—concurrent, teaching, built on Concurrent Pascal with features from CSP by
Per Brinch Hansen
LabVIEW—graphical, dataflow, functions are nodes in a graph, data is wires between
the nodes; includes object-oriented language
Limbo—relative of Alef, for system programming in Inferno (operating system)
Locomotive BASIC—Amstrad variant of BASIC contains EVERY and AFTER commands for
concurrent subroutines
MultiLisp—Scheme variant extended to support parallelism
Modula-2—for system programming, by N. Wirth as a successor to Pascal with native
support for coroutines
Modula-3—modern member of Algol family with extensive support for threads, mutexes,
condition variables
Newsqueak—for research, with channels as first-class values; predecessor of Alef
occam—influenced heavily by communicating sequential processes (CSP)
occam-π—a modern variant of occam, which incorporates ideas from Milner's π-
calculus
ooRexx—object-based, message exchange for communication and synchronization
Orc—heavily concurrent, nondeterministic, based on Kleene algebra
Oz-Mozart—multiparadigm, supports shared-state and message-passing concurrency, and
futures
ParaSail—object-oriented, parallel, free of pointers, race conditions
PHP—multithreading support with parallel extension implementing message passing
inspired from Go
Pict—essentially an executable implementation of Milner's π-calculus
Python — uses thread-based parallelism and process-based parallelism
Raku includes classes for threads, promises and channels by default
Reia—uses asynchronous message passing between shared-nothing objects
Red/System—for system programming, based on Rebol
Rust—for system programming, using message-passing with move semantics, shared
immutable memory, and shared mutable memory.
Scala—general purpose, designed to express common programming patterns in a
concise, elegant, and type-safe way
SequenceL—general purpose functional, main design objectives are ease of
programming, code clarity-readability, and automatic parallelization for
performance on multicore hardware, and provably free of race conditions
SR—for research
SuperPascal—concurrent, for teaching, built on Concurrent Pascal and Joyce by Per
Brinch Hansen
Swift—built-in support for writing asynchronous and parallel code in a structured
way
Unicon—for research
TNSDL—for developing telecommunication exchanges, uses asynchronous message passing
VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL)—IEEE STD-1076
XC—concurrency-extended subset of C language developed by XMOS, based on
communicating sequential processes, built-in constructs for programmable I/O
Many other languages provide support for concurrency in the form of libraries, at
levels roughly comparable with the above list.

== See also ==
Asynchronous I/O
Chu space
Flow-based programming
Java ConcurrentMap
Ptolemy Project
Race condition § Computing
Structured concurrency
Transaction processing

== Notes ==

== References ==

== Sources ==

== Further reading ==
Dijkstra, E. W. (1965). "Solution of a problem in concurrent programming control".
Communications of the ACM. 8 (9): 569. doi:10.1145/365559.365617. S2CID 19357737.
Herlihy, Maurice (2008). The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. Morgan Kaufmann.
ISBN 978-0123705914.
Downey, Allen B. (2005). The Little Book of Semaphores (PDF). Green Tea Press. ISBN
978-1-4414-1868-5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2009-
11-21.
Filman, Robert E.; Daniel P. Friedman (1984). Coordinated Computing: Tools and
Techniques for Distributed Software. New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 370. ISBN 978-0-07-
022439-1.
Leppäjärvi, Jouni (2008). A pragmatic, historically oriented survey on the
universality of synchronization primitives (PDF). University of Oulu. Archived from
the original (PDF) on 2017-08-30. Retrieved 2012-09-13.
Taubenfeld, Gadi (2006). Synchronization Algorithms and Concurrent Programming.
Pearson / Prentice Hall. p. 433. ISBN 978-0-13-197259-9.

== External links ==
Media related to Concurrent programming at Wikimedia Commons
Concurrent Systems Virtual Library