Safe and reliable use of concurrency in multi-threaded shared-memory systems

The safe and reliable use of concurrency in multi-threaded systems has emerged as a fundamental engineering concern. We recently developed a model of synchroniztion contracts to address this concern in programs written in object-oriented languages. Programs written using our model comprise modules that declare access requirments in module interfaces in lieu of using low-level synchroniztion primitives in module implementations. At run time, these contracts are negotiated to derive schedules that guarantee freedom from data races while avoiding a large class of deadlock situations.