A paradigm of Alternating Sequential/Parallel computation in a distributed-memory system over a shared transmission media

The Alternating Sequential/Parallel (ASP) paradigm of computations is revisited to revive the interest of researchers to this form of distributed data processing. We define the ASP paradigm for a particular but practically interesting case when the transmission media is a shared serially used resource, which is typical for many LANs. For this case, a performance measure is derived and some aspects of the applicability of the ASP are considered. Using a class of extended Petri nets and a software package based on these nets, a simulation of the ASP system was carried out for an extremum search, which showed a good speedup of the computation.