Shared Queue, Speculation, Circuits

I would like to say a pattern paper with more than 8-10 pages may be boring and it may not keep users undivided attention in reading it. So Prof. Johnson is clever asking us to write a pattern with 6 or so pages.
All these 3 pattern papers are too long to me and for last few pages I struggled to keep my attention. Concepts for patterns are clear but they may have done a better job keeping it simple and clear with good examples. Here is my brief review on these patterns and looking forward for good discussion on these though…
Shared Queue Pattern

Shared queues are well known in application development community. A centralized share queues are easier to implement. A well known use of shared queue is with a thread pool. This can be implemented as individual threads take tasks directly from the queue or a master thread distributes the tasks to the threads.

This paper used the examples with separate locks for push and pull but I think it is easier to use and maintain a single lock for the entire queue. Two locks might be more depending on the number threads at a time in the queue and maximum size of the queue.


Speculation Pattern

This speculation is similar to branch prediction that I learned in CS421. Given example is not very clear to me and I may get better understanding of this pattern with respect to parallel world and speculation.

Circuits Pattern

As I am learning about the time bounds that depend on the input size from the algorithms class (As algorithm teaches to be linear or polynomial in execution of the algorithm with respect to input size) this pattern’s problem is eye catching for me.
I like the example but I wish they showed it from high level language. I have to listen to class to get more insight in this one….