On Distributability in Process Calculi

Peters, Kirstin; Nestmann, Uwe; Goltz, Ursula

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-37036-6_18

Cited by 34 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Thus, we cannot easily refer to the standard algebraic terminology of homomorphisms in order to establish criteria on encodings. This is, however, sometimes done for individual operators that are present in both S and T ; for process calculus models, the homomorphism requirement applied to the parallel operator is a prominent example and constitutes an important, although not universally agreed, building block for many separation results (Palamidessi 2003;Peters and Nestmann 2012;Peters et al 2013). Note that full abstraction itself does not at all refer to structural requirements on encodings.…”

Section: Basic Notionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Full abstraction for expressiveness: history, myths and facts

Gorla

Nestmann

2014

Math. Struct. Comp. Sci.

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What does it mean that an encoding is fully abstract? What does it not mean? In this position paper, we want to help the reader to evaluate the real benefits of using such a notion when studying the expressiveness of programming languages. Several examples and counterexamples are given. In some cases, we work at a very abstract level; in other cases, we give concrete samples taken from the field of process calculi, where the theory of expressiveness has been mostly developed in the last years.

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Section: Basic Notionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Full abstraction for expressiveness: history, myths and facts

Gorla

Nestmann

2014

Math. Struct. Comp. Sci.

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“…Moreover, it is shown how easily the proofs there can be adapted to show similar separation results between other calculi. Similarly we can adapt the above proofs to show that there is no good and causality preserving encoding from π a into the Join Calculus -using the counterexample that transferred into a Petri net has the shape of a pure M of Peters et al (2013) -or how a similar result can be proved for action-guarded variants of CSP.…”

Section: 22mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…In Peters et al (2013) and Peters (2012), the same counterexample and a similar proof technique as in Section 3.5 is used to show that no good encoding between π mix and (π sep or) π a preserves distributability. Moreover, it is shown how easily the proofs there can be adapted to show similar separation results between other calculi.…”

Section: 22mentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchrony versus causality in distributed systems

Peters¹,

Schicke-Uffmann

Goltz

et al. 2014

Math. Struct. Comp. Sci.

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Given a synchronous system, we study the question whether -or, under which conditionsthe behaviour of that system can be realized by a (non-trivially) distributed and hence asynchronous implementation. In this paper, we partially answer this question by examining the role of causality for the implementation of synchrony in two fundamental different formalisms of concurrency, Petri nets and the π-calculus. For both formalisms it turns out that each 'good' encoding of synchronous interactions using just asynchronous interactions introduces causal dependencies in the translation. IntroductionSynchronous and asynchronous interactions are the two basic paradigms of interactions in distributed systems. While synchronous interactions are widely used in specification languages, asynchronous interactions are often better suited to implement real systems. It would be desirable -from a programming standpoint -to design systems in a synchronous fashion, yet reap the benefits of parallelism by means of an (ideally automatically generated) implementation executed on multiple processing units in parallel, between which only asynchronous communication is possible. Thus, we are interested in the conditions under which synchronous interactions can be implemented using just asynchronous interactions, while maximizing the degree of distribution. To partially answer this question, we examine the role of causality for encoding synchrony. We formalize and study this problem by means of Petri nets (see Section 2) as well as the π-calculus (see Section 3), as synchronous and asynchronous interactions have already been studied in both models to quite some extent.Petri nets and the π-calculus are two fundamentally different models for reactive systems. However, certain basic phenomena show up in both in at least similar ways. Three of them play a crucial role for our investigation. A reactive system exhibits its behaviour by executing various actions. Studying the possible behaviour of a system, two action occurrences must be related in one of three ways: there can either be a choice between the two, one of the two can be causally dependent on the other, or the two can be entirely independent. † This work was supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation), grants NE-1505/2-1 and GO-671/6-1. If there is a choice between two behaviours, the system can only exhibit one. If multiple copies of the same system would be started though, they could each choose a different alternative.In Petri nets, choice is represented by conflict, i.e. by two transitions sharing a common preplace and competing for tokens such that each transition can fire separately but not both at the same time. The processing of conflicts in Petri nets is inherently synchronous, in particular multiple conflicts transitively connecting an arbitrary number of transitions will always be decided consistently.In the π-calculus, choice can be implemented directly via the choice operator or indirectly by offering multiple matching outputs for a single input or vice versa. The choi...

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“…More recently, work on the hardware implementation of CSP programs required the design of a protocol [49], which however imposes a restriction on the number of processes that can send data during an interaction. Theoretical studies on the encoding of interactions in the π-calculus also refer to rendezvous implementation techniques [47,55]. All the works presented in [8,61,62,53,65,54] focus on the protocol rather than on the compiler implementation.…”

Section: Distributed Implementation Of Multiway Rendezvousmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic distributed code generation from formal models of asynchronous processes interacting by multiway rendezvous

Evrard

Lang

2017

Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming

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Formal process languages inheriting the concurrency and communication features of process algebras are convenient formalisms to model distributed applications, especially when they are equipped with formal verification tools (e.g., model checkers) to help hunting for bugs early in the development process. However, even starting from a fully verified formal model, bugs are likely to be introduced while translating (generally by hand) the concurrent model -which relies on high-level and expressive communication primitives-into the distributed implementation -which often relies on low-level communication primitives. In this paper, we present DLC, a compiler that enables distributed code to be generated from models written in a formal process language called LNT, which is equipped with a rich verification toolbox named CADP, and where processes interact by value-passing multiway rendezvous. The generated code uses an elaborate protocol to implement rendezvous, and can be either executed in an autonomous way (i.e., without requiring additional code to be defined by the user), or connected to external software through user-modifiable C functions. The protocol itself is modeled in LNT and verified using CADP. We present several experiments assessing the performance of DLC, including the Raft consensus algorithm.

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On Distributability in Process Calculi

Cited by 34 publications

References 26 publications

Full abstraction for expressiveness: history, myths and facts

Full abstraction for expressiveness: history, myths and facts

Synchrony versus causality in distributed systems

Automatic distributed code generation from formal models of asynchronous processes interacting by multiway rendezvous

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