Concurrency

The basic phenomenon here is that synchronizing different processes, establishing shared state, or imposing an order on events requires communication among the processes. In essence, any notion of time in concurrency control must be intimately tied to communication It is intriguing that a similar connection between time and communication also arises in the Theory of Relativity, where the speed of light (the fastest signal that can be used to synchronize events) is a fundamental constant relating time and space. The complexities we encounter in dealing with time and state in our computational models may in fact mirror a fundamental complexity of the physical universe.