06121 Executive Summary – Atomicity: A Unifying Concept in Computer Science

Abstract

This seminar was based on and continued the interaction of different computer-science communities that was begun in an earlier Dagstuhl seminar in April 2004. Both seminars have aimed at a deeper understanding of the fundamental concept of atomic actions and their roles in system design, execution, modeling, and correctness reasoning, and at fostering collaboration, synergies, and a unified perspective across largely separated research communities. Each of the two seminar brought together about 30 researchers and industrial practitioners from the four areas of database and transaction processing systems, fault tolerance and dependable systems, formal methods, and to smaller extent, hardware architecture and programming languages. The interpretations and roles of the atomicity concept(s) vary substantially across these communities. For example, the emphasis in database systems is on algorithms and implementation techniques for atomic transactions, whereas in dependable systems and formal methods atomicity is viewed as an intentionally imposed or postulated property of system components to simplify designs and increase dependability. Nevertheless, all four communities share the hope that it will eventually be possible to unify the different scientific viewpoints into more coherent foundations, system development principles, design methodologies, and usage guidelines.