Affinity: a concurrent programming environment

Affinity is a small and comprehensible programming model for concurrent computation. Affinity consistency and coherence properties provide a tractable discipline for the dangerous power of a concurrent, shared-memory programming style. Affinity program are less tediously detailed than their message-passing counterparts while demonstrating comparable efficiency, scalability, and tolerance of network latency. By use of memory-management hardware, the programming environment can transparently convert conventional C++ operations into a sequence of synthetic transactions on the computational state. The combination of inherent fault-tolerance and insensitivity to communications latency may prove particularly valuable for distributed workstation clusters