Improvements on handling design errors in communication protocols.

With the rapid development of the Internet and distributed systems, communication protocols play a more and more important role. The correctness of the design of these communication protocols becomes crucial especially when critical applications are concerned. Common logical design errors in communication protocols include deadlock states, unspecified receptions, channel overflow, non-executable transitions, etc. Such design errors can be removed via protocol synthesis, or be detected through reachability analysis. The former may introduce more states and transitions than needed and the latter suffers from state space explosion problem. Here we present an improvement on existing technique to transform a protocol design into a deadlock-free one where the number of introduced new states and transitions can be considerably reduced. We also propose a sound reduction technique on a class of protocol designs to significantly reduce their sizes in order to perform reachability analysis.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .D83. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1399. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

On-Chip Transparent Wire Pipelining (invited paper)

Wire pipelining has been proposed as a viable mean to break the discrepancy between decreasing gate delays and increasing wire delays in deep-submicron technologies. Far from being a straightforwardly applicable technique, this methodology requires a number of design modifications in order to insert it seamlessly in the current design flow. In this paper we briefly survey the methods presented by other researchers in the field and then we thoroughly analyze the solutions we recently proposed, ranging from system-level wire pipelining to physical design aspects

Life of occam-Pi

This paper considers some questions prompted by a brief review of the history of computing. Why is programming so hard? Why is concurrency considered an “advanced” subject? What’s the matter with Objects? Where did all the Maths go? In searching for answers, the paper looks at some concerns over fundamental ideas within object orientation (as represented by modern programming languages), before focussing on the concurrency model of communicating processes and its particular expression in the occam family of languages. In that focus, it looks at the history of occam, its underlying philosophy (Ockham’s Razor), its semantic foundation on Hoare’s CSP, its principles of process oriented design and its development over almost three decades into occam-? (which blends in the concurrency dynamics of Milner’s ?-calculus). Also presented will be an urgent need for rationalisation – occam-? is an experiment that has demonstrated significant results, but now needs time to be spent on careful review and implementing the conclusions of that review. Finally, the future is considered. In particular, is there a future