“By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian” (Austen)

In the course of other researches, I realized that I had forgotten (or in some cases never known) the works that are the basis of the presently dominant techniques for programming concurrent computations in a shared-memory computer: threads, events, mutexes, monitors, condition variables, and (coming soon, perhaps) transactional memory. I unearthed the works that I personally believe have been most influential, acquired copies of each of them, and (re-)read them. Subsequently, some of my colleagues found my collection educational, so I have chosen to present it here for all to see.

My primary selection criterion was that I found the work helpful in understanding how and why the state of our art has reached its current point. I ignored some potentially relevant but separable areas, notably Byzantine algorithms. The collection is biased towards works aimed at practitioners: the people who build systems that will be used by others. There are very few theorems in this collection.

This is my own collection—if you want a different collection, you can create one yourself. But if you would like to suggest additions or corrections I would nevertheless be happy to hear from you.

For each paper, I provide the citation and a link to an online source for the paper. All of the papers are available for download. Most of them are on an author’s web site; for the others you will need to have access to the ACM Digital Library.

Andrew Birrell, December 2006

---