Multithreaded transactions in scientific computing: New versions of a computer program for kinematical calculations of RHEED intensity oscillations

Abstract

Writing a concurrent program can be more difficult than writing a sequential program. Programmer needs to think about synchronisation, race conditions and shared variables. Transactions help reduce the inconvenience of using threads. A transaction is an abstraction, which allows programmers to group a sequence of actions on the program into a logical, higher-level computation unit. This paper presents multithreaded versions of the GROWTH program, which allow to calculate the layer coverages during the growth of thin epitaxial films and the corresponding RHEED intensities according to the kinematical approximation. The presented programs also contain graphical user interfaces, which enable displaying program data at run-time.