An O(min(m, n)) Parallel Deadlock Detection Algorithm

This article presents a novel Parallel Deadlock Detection Algorithm (PDDA) and its hardware implementation, Deadlock Detection Unit (DDU). PDDA uses simple Boolean representations of request, grant, and no activity so that the hardware implementation of PDDA becomes easier and operates faster. We prove the correctness of PDDA and that the DDU has a runtime complexity of O(min(m, n)), where m is the number of resources and n is the number of processes. The DDU reduces deadlock detection time by 99%, (i.e., 100X) or more compared to software implementations of deadlock detection algorithms. An experiment involving a practical situation with an early dead-lock condition showed that the time measured from application initialization to deadlock detection was reduced by 46 % by employing the DDU as compared to detecting deadlock in software