Concurrency: The Next Generation

Concurrency is needed everywhere. In emerging platforms such as wireless sensor networks, where a large number of tiny physically separate computational devices must be able to act as a coherent unit. In the multi-core processors, which are being introduced in consumer devices in response to the ever growing demand for performance, due to the physical limitations of current processor architectures. In high-performance scientific computing, where concurrency already plays a large role, and in teaching, to ensure that future software engineers have the skills required to use these new technologies. The need for safe and robust concurrency in all these areas is fundamental. The Transterpreter is a small portable runtime for occam-pi, which runs on a wide range of devices, from small sensor nodes to high-performance clusters, diminishing the boundaries between small and large platforms. occam-pi provides a consistent set of rich, robust and mathematically backed concurrency primitives which scale well, not only with program complexity, but also with device size. As concurrent systems become commonplace, the need for languages supporting these notions of concurrency is growing rapidly.