Articles de Mingxing Zhang :

Consistency Models Explained Briefly

On in Bookmark by Mingxing Zhang
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URL: http://coldattic.info/shvedsky/pro/blogs/a-foo-walks-into-a-bar/posts/88

Consistency model, which describes how far the behavior of your multi-threaded (or distributed) system is from the ideal "sequential behavior", belongs to the most important concepts of concurrency systems. But unfortunatly, discriptions about this topic are usually incomplete and even inconsistent with each other.

This article, as its title indicates, clearly explains all the important consistency models with vivid diagrammatic presentations, which is well worth reading.

Its main content is following:

  • "Multithreading" Consistency Models

    • Strong Consistency aka Linearizability
    • Sequential Consistency
    • Quiescent Consistency
  • "Distributed" Consistency Models

    • Eventual Consistency
    • Strict Consistency
    • Serializability

Parallel Merge Sort

On in Bookmark by Mingxing Zhang
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URL: http://coldattic.info/shvedsky/pro/blogs/a-foo-walks-into-a-bar/posts/49

I used to think that the "merge" step of merge sort cannot be efficiently parallelized, because the fact that an element belongs to the tail of one sorted array could not even guarrantee that it won't rank first in the other sorted arrary.

But this article illustrates that we can get across this obstacle by doing some binary search in advence.

And even better, this algorithm preserves merges sort's ability to be a external sort.

Start Blogging Now

On in Blog by Mingxing Zhang
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Inspired and encoraged by Nathan Marz's posts [1, 2], I made the decision to restart my blog here. But since I'm infected with procrastination to some extent, I may only share several interesting articles with my own comments under the "Bookmark" column in the begining. I hope this will help me develop a habit of writing and sharing.

Actually, I have already goten some articles under crafting, but I'm not sure when I can finish them ......

Thank you for your reading, and I hope that I can see you again.