5,452 research outputs found
To boldly go:an occam-π mission to engineer emergence
Future systems will be too complex to design and implement explicitly. Instead, we will have to learn to engineer complex behaviours indirectly: through the discovery and application of local rules of behaviour, applied to simple process components, from which desired behaviours predictably emerge through dynamic interactions between massive numbers of instances. This paper describes a process-oriented architecture for fine-grained concurrent systems that enables experiments with such indirect engineering. Examples are presented showing the differing complex behaviours that can arise from minor (non-linear) adjustments to low-level parameters, the difficulties in suppressing the emergence of unwanted (bad) behaviour, the unexpected relationships between apparently unrelated physical phenomena (shown up by their separate emergence from the same primordial process swamp) and the ability to explore and engineer completely new physics (such as force fields) by their emergence from low-level process interactions whose mechanisms can only be imagined, but not built, at the current time
OpenPING: A Reflective Middleware for the Construction of Adaptive Networked Game Applications
The emergence of distributed Virtual Reality (VR) applications
that run over the Internet has presented networked game
application designers with new challenges. In an environment
where the public internet streams multimedia data and is
constantly under pressure to deliver over widely heterogeneous
user-platforms, there has been a growing need that distributed VR
applications be aware of and adapt to frequent variations in their
context of execution. In this paper, we argue that in contrast to
research efforts targeted at improvement of scalability, persistence
and responsiveness capabilities, much less attempts have been
aimed at addressing the flexibility, maintainability and
extensibility requirements in contemporary distributed VR
platforms. We propose the use of structural reflection as an
approach that not only addresses these requirements but also
offers added value in the form of providing a framework for
scalability, persistence and responsiveness that is itself flexible,
maintainable and extensible. We also present an adaptive
middleware platform implementation called OpenPING1 that
supports our proposal in addressing these requirements
Towards Practical Graph-Based Verification for an Object-Oriented Concurrency Model
To harness the power of multi-core and distributed platforms, and to make the
development of concurrent software more accessible to software engineers,
different object-oriented concurrency models such as SCOOP have been proposed.
Despite the practical importance of analysing SCOOP programs, there are
currently no general verification approaches that operate directly on program
code without additional annotations. One reason for this is the multitude of
partially conflicting semantic formalisations for SCOOP (either in theory or
by-implementation). Here, we propose a simple graph transformation system (GTS)
based run-time semantics for SCOOP that grasps the most common features of all
known semantics of the language. This run-time model is implemented in the
state-of-the-art GTS tool GROOVE, which allows us to simulate, analyse, and
verify a subset of SCOOP programs with respect to deadlocks and other
behavioural properties. Besides proposing the first approach to verify SCOOP
programs by automatic translation to GTS, we also highlight our experiences of
applying GTS (and especially GROOVE) for specifying semantics in the form of a
run-time model, which should be transferable to GTS models for other concurrent
languages and libraries.Comment: In Proceedings GaM 2015, arXiv:1504.0244
Data refinement for true concurrency
The majority of modern systems exhibit sophisticated concurrent behaviour, where several system components modify and observe the system state with fine-grained atomicity. Many systems (e.g., multi-core processors, real-time controllers) also exhibit truly concurrent behaviour, where multiple events can occur simultaneously. This paper presents data refinement defined in terms of an interval-based framework, which includes high-level operators that capture non-deterministic expression evaluation. By modifying the type of an interval, our theory may be specialised to cover data refinement of both discrete and continuous systems. We present an interval-based encoding of forward simulation, then prove that our forward simulation rule is sound with respect to our data refinement definition. A number of rules for decomposing forward simulation proofs over both sequential and parallel composition are developed
Reasoning algebraically about refinement on TSO architectures
The Total Store Order memory model is widely implemented by modern multicore architectures such as x86, where local buffers are used for optimisation, allowing limited forms of instruction reordering. The presence of buffers and hardware-controlled buffer flushes increases the level of non-determinism from the level specified by a program, complicating the already difficult task of concurrent programming. This paper presents a new notion of refinement for weak memory models, based on the observation that pending writes to a process' local variables may be treated as if the effect of the update has already occurred in shared memory. We develop an interval-based model with algebraic rules for various programming constructs. In this framework, several decomposition rules for our new notion of refinement are developed. We apply our approach to verify the spinlock algorithm from the literature
Probabilistic Rely-guarantee Calculus
Jones' rely-guarantee calculus for shared variable concurrency is extended to
include probabilistic behaviours. We use an algebraic approach which combines
and adapts probabilistic Kleene algebras with concurrent Kleene algebra.
Soundness of the algebra is shown relative to a general probabilistic event
structure semantics. The main contribution of this paper is a collection of
rely-guarantee rules built on top of that semantics. In particular, we show how
to obtain bounds on probabilities by deriving rely-guarantee rules within the
true-concurrent denotational semantics. The use of these rules is illustrated
by a detailed verification of a simple probabilistic concurrent program: a
faulty Eratosthenes sieve.Comment: Preprint submitted to TCS-QAP
Towards a Theory of Glue
We propose and study the notions of behaviour type and composition operator
making a first step towards the definition of a formal framework for studying
behaviour composition in a setting sufficiently general to provide insight into
how the component-based systems should be modelled and compared. We illustrate
the proposed notions on classical examples (Traces, Labelled Transition Systems
and Coalgebras). Finally, the definition of memoryless glue operators, takes us
one step closer to a formal understanding of the separation of concerns
principle stipulating that computational aspects of a system should be
localised within its atomic components, whereas coordination layer responsible
for managing concurrency should be realised by memoryless glue operators.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2012, arXiv:1212.345
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
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