Robert Arthur Nelson

An anomaly in space-time characteristics of certain programs running in a paging machine

The running time of programs in a paging machine generally increases as the store in which programs are constrained to run decreases. Experiment, however, have revealed cases in which the reverse is true: a decrease in the size of the store is accompanied by a decrease in running time. An informal discussion of the anomalous behavior is given, and for the case of the FIFO replacement algorithm a formal treatment is presented.

Casting Petri Nets into Programs

A programming system has been implemented in which annotated Petri nets are used as machine-processable high-evel design representations. The nets can be used to express the parallelism and the dynamic sequential dependencies found in complex software. They can then be interactively fired to facilitate debugging of the design. The nets are processed into a procedure language, called XL/1, to which a variety of transformations are applied in order to produce more efficient programs. These programs are generated for either a serial or a parallel processing environment. Finally, the XL/1 programs may be translated into PL/I or PL/S. The serial processing versions have been compiled and run successfully, but the parallel processing versions have not yet been run in a parallel processing environment.