Applications of conflict-free Petri nets to parallel programs and asynchronous circuits

Abstract

The author composes a unified approach for dealing with the race detection problem for two entirely different models, namely, parallel programs and asynchronous circuits. It is shown that the problem of determining whether two transitions in a one-bounded conflict-free Petri net can become enabled simultaneously is solvable in polynomial time. This is referred to as the pairwise concurrency problem. It is then shown that the race detection problem for parallel programs (asynchronous circuits) and the pairwise concurrency problem for Petri nets are closely related to each other. As a result, race conditions can be detected efficiently for those parallel programs and asynchronous circuits that can be modeled by one-bounded conflict-free Petri nets.<>