Distributed Synthesis for Acyclic Architectures

The distributed synthesis problem is about constructing correct distributed systems, i.e., systems that satisfy a given specification. We consider a slightly more general problem of distributed control, where the goal is to restrict the behavior of a given distributed system in order to satisfy the specification. Our systems are finite state machines that communicate via rendez-vous (Zielonka automata). We show decidability of the synthesis problem for all omega-regular local specifications, under the restriction that the communication graph of the system is acyclic. This result extends a previous decidability result for a restricted form of local reachability specifications

Asynchronous Games over Tree Architectures

We consider the task of controlling in a distributed way a Zielonka asynchronous automaton. Every process of a controller has access to its causal past to determine the next set of actions it proposes to play. An action can be played only if every process controlling this action proposes to play it. We consider reachability objectives: every process should reach its set of final states. We show that this control problem is decidable for tree architectures, where every process can communicate with its parent, its children, and with the environment. The complexity of our algorithm is l-fold exponential with l being the height of the tree representing the architecture. We show that this is unavoidable by showing that even for three processes the problem is EXPTIME-complete, and that it is non-elementary in general

On the Control of Asynchronous Automata

The decidability of the distributed version of the Ramadge and Wonham controller synthesis problem,where both the plant and the controllers are modeled as asynchronous automataand the controllers have causal memoryis a challenging open problem.There exist three classes of plants for which the existence of a correct controller with causal memory has been shown decidable: when the dependency graph of actions is series-parallel, when the processes are connectedly communicating and when the dependency graph of processes is a tree. We design a class of plants, called decomposable games, with a decidable controller synthesis problem.This provides a unified proof of the three existing decidability results as well as new examples of decidable plants

Variable-based multi-module data caches for clustered VLIW processors

Memory structures consume an important fraction of the total processor energy. One solution to reduce the energy consumed by cache memories consists of reducing their supply voltage and/or increase their threshold voltage at an expense in access time. We propose to divide the L1 data cache into two cache modules for a clustered VLIW processor consisting of two clusters. Such division is done on a variable basis so that the address of a datum determines its location. Each cache module is assigned to a cluster and can be set up as a fast power-hungry module or as a slow power-aware module. We also present compiler techniques in order to distribute variables between the two cache modules and generate code accordingly. We have explored several cache configurations using the Mediabench suite and we have observed that the best distributed cache organization outperforms traditional cache organizations by 19%-31% in energy-delay and by 11%-29% in energy-delay. In addition, we also explore a reconfigurable distributed cache, where the cache can be reconfigured on a context switch. This reconfigurable scheme further outperforms the best previous distributed organization by 3%-4%.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Infinite games with finite knowledge gaps

Infinite games where several players seek to coordinate under imperfect information are deemed to be undecidable, unless the information is hierarchically ordered among the players. We identify a class of games for which joint winning strategies can be constructed effectively without restricting the direction of information flow. Instead, our condition requires that the players attain common knowledge about the actual state of the game over and over again along every play. We show that it is decidable whether a given game satisfies the condition, and prove tight complexity bounds for the strategy synthesis problem under $\omega$-regular winning conditions given by parity automata.Comment: 39 pages; 2nd revision; submitted to Information and Computatio