Visual programming by transaction network

Abstract

A parallel computation model is introduced that is suitable for pursuit of large-scale concurrency. The goal is to develop a semantically clean paradigm for distributed computation with fine-grained parallelism. The approach taken is to promote the notion of transaction, an anonymous atomic action void of internal state, as the basic element of computation. A computation is organized as a network, called a transaction net, of databases connected by transactions. A transaction, when it is fired, consumers data objects from source databases and produces data objects in target databases as an atomic action. A transaction net is akin to a Petri net, where the token, the place, and the transition corresponds to the data, the database, and the transaction, respectively. The state of computation is represented by the data state without the control state. An informal definition of the model is given. Solutions are given for well-known programming problems.<>