Methodology for Introducing Concurrency into Sequential Programs

Abstract

Efficiency of software application is one of the important metrics that are used to measure the quality of software applications. Nowadays, more and more professionals are focusing on programming technology because suitable programming may make the products more efficient. The emergence of multiprocessor systems and multi-core CPUs makes concurrent programs much more popular than sequential programs. However, a great number of large complex software applications that have already been released and are currently being used by many clients are programmed in sequential fashion. Compared to developing the program from scratch again, code refactoring with the concept of concurrent programming would be a better choice. It saves effort, time, manpower and money. This thesis studies the problems of introducing concurrency into large and complex software applications and proposes a methodology for transforming sequential programs into concurrent programs. We successfully speeded up a prototype of IBM Security AppScan Source for Analysis by introducing concurrency into the program. The performance of the application was improved, thus demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed methodology.