Methods of Resource Allocation with Conflict Detection

Abstract

The problems of resource allocation in query-applying pattern widely exist in daily applications. Resource allocation has the characteristic of exclusiveness. Lock methods are mostly used to deal with possible conflicts in the allocation process in traditional solutions. There is a natural contradiction between lock mechanism and multi task parallelism and such contradiction becomes more and more protruding with the increasing popularity of parallel processing environments represented by multi core CPU. A method of abandoning lock mechanism at application level is discussed in this paper. Instead, the method of resource conflict detection is used to ensure the correctness of transaction parallelism. According to sufficient conditions for the effectiveness of conflict detection, two kinds of conflict detection algorithms are proposed, which are separately based on the queue and on Key-T table. Then, the problem of resource allocation is further extended to "renting" situation with "time dimension", where a more general conflict detection algorithm is proposed. The parallel efficiency of multi task system can be improved remarkably and the implementation of the system can be much simplified with the scheme based on conflict detection.