Deadlock detection for distributed process networks

The process network (PN) model, which consists of concurrent processes communicating over first-in first out unidirectional queues, is useful for modeling and exploiting functional parallelism in streaming data applications. The PN model maps easily onto multi-processor and/or multi-threaded targets. Since the PN model is Turing complete, memory requirements cannot be predicted statically. In general, any bounded-memory scheduling algorithm for this model requires run-time deadlock detection. The few PN implementations that perform deadlock detection detect only global deadlocks. Not all local deadlocks, however, will cause a PN system to reach global deadlock. In this paper, we present the first local deadlock detection algorithm for PN models. The proposed algorithm is based on the Mitchell and Merritt algorithm and is suitable for both parallel and distributed PN implementations.