3,567 research outputs found
The role of concurrency in an evolutionary view of programming abstractions
In this paper we examine how concurrency has been embodied in mainstream
programming languages. In particular, we rely on the evolutionary talking
borrowed from biology to discuss major historical landmarks and crucial
concepts that shaped the development of programming languages. We examine the
general development process, occasionally deepening into some language, trying
to uncover evolutionary lineages related to specific programming traits. We
mainly focus on concurrency, discussing the different abstraction levels
involved in present-day concurrent programming and emphasizing the fact that
they correspond to different levels of explanation. We then comment on the role
of theoretical research on the quest for suitable programming abstractions,
recalling the importance of changing the working framework and the way of
looking every so often. This paper is not meant to be a survey of modern
mainstream programming languages: it would be very incomplete in that sense. It
aims instead at pointing out a number of remarks and connect them under an
evolutionary perspective, in order to grasp a unifying, but not simplistic,
view of the programming languages development process
A guided tour of asynchronous cellular automata
Research on asynchronous cellular automata has received a great amount of
attention these last years and has turned to a thriving field. We survey the
recent research that has been carried out on this topic and present a wide
state of the art where computing and modelling issues are both represented.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Cellular Automat
Testing of Concurrent Programs
Testing concurrent systems requires exploring all possible non-deterministic interleavings that the concurrent execution may have, as any of the interleavings may reveal erroneous behaviour. This introduces a new problem: the well-known state space problem, which is often computationally intractable. In the present thesis, this issue will be addressed through: (1) the development of new Partial-Order Reduction Techniques and (2) the combination of static analysis and testing (property-based testing) in order to reduce the combinatorial explosion. As a preliminary result, we have performed an experimental evaluation on the SYCO tool, a CLP-based testing framework for actor-based concurrency, where these techniques have been implemented. Finally, our experiments prove the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed techniques
Verification and Synthesis of Symmetric Uni-Rings for Leads-To Properties
This paper investigates the verification and synthesis of parameterized
protocols that satisfy leadsto properties on symmetric
unidirectional rings (a.k.a. uni-rings) of deterministic and constant-space
processes under no fairness and interleaving semantics, where and are
global state predicates. First, we show that verifying for
parameterized protocols on symmetric uni-rings is undecidable, even for
deterministic and constant-space processes, and conjunctive state predicates.
Then, we show that surprisingly synthesizing symmetric uni-ring protocols that
satisfy is actually decidable. We identify necessary and
sufficient conditions for the decidability of synthesis based on which we
devise a sound and complete polynomial-time algorithm that takes the predicates
and , and automatically generates a parameterized protocol that
satisfies for unbounded (but finite) ring sizes. Moreover, we
present some decidability results for cases where leadsto is required from
multiple distinct predicates to different predicates. To demonstrate
the practicality of our synthesis method, we synthesize some parameterized
protocols, including agreement and parity protocols
Revisiting Underapproximate Reachability for Multipushdown Systems
Boolean programs with multiple recursive threads can be captured as pushdown
automata with multiple stacks. This model is Turing complete, and hence, one is
often interested in analyzing a restricted class that still captures useful
behaviors. In this paper, we propose a new class of bounded under
approximations for multi-pushdown systems, which subsumes most existing
classes. We develop an efficient algorithm for solving the under-approximate
reachability problem, which is based on efficient fix-point computations. We
implement it in our tool BHIM and illustrate its applicability by generating a
set of relevant benchmarks and examining its performance. As an additional
takeaway, BHIM solves the binary reachability problem in pushdown automata. To
show the versatility of our approach, we then extend our algorithm to the timed
setting and provide the first implementation that can handle timed
multi-pushdown automata with closed guards.Comment: 52 pages, Conference TACAS 202
Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency
This paper retraces, collects, and summarises contributions of the authors --- in collaboration with others --- on the theme of Petri nets and their categorical relationships to other models of concurrency
- …