Java 7 Phaser - academia paper

Phasers: a Unified Deadlock-Free Construct for Collective and Point-to-point Synchronization

ABSTRACT
Coordination and synchronization of parallel tasks is a major source of complexity in parallel programming. These constructs take many forms in practice including mutual exclusion in accesses to shared resources, termination detection of child tasks, collective barrier synchronization, and point-to-point synchronization. In this paper, we introduce phasers, a new coordination construct that unifies collective and point-to-point synchronizations. We establish two safety properties for phasers: deadlock-freedom and phaseordering. Performance results obtained from a portable implementation of phasers on three different SMP platforms demonstrate that phasers can deliver superior performance to existing barrier implementations, in addition to the productivity benefits that result from their generality and safety properties.

P.S. From this article - New Java Concurrency Feature: Phasers

Doug Lea Discusses the Fork/Join Framework

Doug Lea Discusses the Fork/Join Framework.

Summary
Doug Lea talks to InfoQ about the evolution of the Fork/Join Framework, the new features planned for java.util.concurrent in Java 7, and the "Extra 166" package. The interview goes on to explore some of the hardware and language changes that are impacting concurrent programming, and the effect the increasing prevalence of alternative languages in the JVM are having on library design.

Bio
Doug Lea is a professor of computer science at State University of New York at Oswego where he specialises in concurrent programming and the design of concurrent data structures. He wrote "Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns", one of the first books on the subject, and chaired JSR 166, which added concurrency utilities to Java.