151,067 research outputs found
Soft Concurrent Constraint Programming
Soft constraints extend classical constraints to represent multiple
consistency levels, and thus provide a way to express preferences, fuzziness,
and uncertainty. While there are many soft constraint solving formalisms, even
distributed ones, by now there seems to be no concurrent programming framework
where soft constraints can be handled. In this paper we show how the classical
concurrent constraint (cc) programming framework can work with soft
constraints, and we also propose an extension of cc languages which can use
soft constraints to prune and direct the search for a solution. We believe that
this new programming paradigm, called soft cc (scc), can be also very useful in
many web-related scenarios. In fact, the language level allows web agents to
express their interaction and negotiation protocols, and also to post their
requests in terms of preferences, and the underlying soft constraint solver can
find an agreement among the agents even if their requests are incompatible.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, submitted to the ACM Transactions on
Computational Logic (TOCL), zipped file
Reactive concurrent programming revisited
In this note we revisit the so-called reactive programming style, which
evolves from the synchronous programming model of the Esterel language by
weakening the assumption that the absence of an event can be detected
instantaneously. We review some research directions that have been explored
since the emergence of the reactive model ten years ago. We shall also outline
some questions that remain to be investigated
From Events to Reactions: A Progress Report
Syndicate is a new coordinated, concurrent programming language. It occupies
a novel point on the spectrum between the shared-everything paradigm of threads
and the shared-nothing approach of actors. Syndicate actors exchange messages
and share common knowledge via a carefully controlled database that clearly
scopes conversations. This approach clearly simplifies coordination of
concurrent activities. Experience in programming with Syndicate, however,
suggests a need to raise the level of linguistic abstraction. In addition to
writing event handlers and managing event subscriptions directly, the language
will have to support a reactive style of programming. This paper presents
event-oriented Syndicate programming and then describes a preliminary design
for augmenting it with new reactive programming constructs.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2016, arXiv:1606.0540
Concurrent constraint programming with process mobility
We propose an extension of concurrent constraint programming with primitives for process migration within a hierarchical network, and we study its semantics. To this purpose, we first investigate a "pure " paradigm for process migration, namely a paradigm where the only actions are those dealing with transmissions of processes. Our goal is to give a structural definition of the semantics of migration; namely, we want to describe the behaviour of the system, during the transmission of a process, in terms of the behaviour of the components. We achieve this goal by using a labeled transition system where the effects of sending a process, and requesting a process, are modeled by symmetric rules (similar to handshaking-rules for synchronous communication) between the two partner nodes in the network. Next, we extend our paradigm with the primitives of concurrent constraint programming, and we show how to enrich the semantics to cope with the notions of environment and constraint store. Finally, we show how the operational semantics can be used to define an interpreter for the basic calculus.
A compiler approach to scalable concurrent program design
The programmer's most powerful tool for controlling complexity in program design is abstraction. We seek to use abstraction in the design of concurrent programs, so as to
separate design decisions concerned with decomposition, communication, synchronization, mapping, granularity, and load balancing. This paper describes programming and compiler techniques intended to facilitate this design strategy. The programming techniques are based on a core programming notation with two important properties: the ability to separate concurrent programming concerns, and extensibility with reusable programmer-defined
abstractions. The compiler techniques are based on a simple transformation system together with a set of compilation transformations and portable run-time support. The
transformation system allows programmer-defined abstractions to be defined as source-to-source transformations that convert abstractions into the core notation. The same
transformation system is used to apply compilation transformations that incrementally transform the core notation toward an abstract concurrent machine. This machine can be implemented on a variety of concurrent architectures using simple run-time support.
The transformation, compilation, and run-time system techniques have been implemented and are incorporated in a public-domain program development toolkit. This
toolkit operates on a wide variety of networked workstations, multicomputers, and shared-memory
multiprocessors. It includes a program transformer, concurrent compiler, syntax checker, debugger, performance analyzer, and execution animator. A variety of substantial
applications have been developed using the toolkit, in areas such as climate modeling and fluid dynamics
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