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Mobile Barriers for occam-pi: Semantics, Implementation and Application

Welch, Peter H. and Barnes, Frederick R.M. (2005) Mobile Barriers for occam-pi: Semantics, Implementation and Application. In: Broenink, Jan F. and Roebbers, Herman W. and Sunter, J.P.E. and Welch, Peter H. and Wood, David C., eds. Communicating Process Architectures 2005. Concurrent Systems Engineering . IOS Press, Amsterdam, Netherlands, pp. 289-316. ISBN 978-1-58603-561-7. E-ISBN 978-1-60750-144-2. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:14271)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.

Abstract

This paper introduces a safe language binding for CSP multiway events (barriers -- both static and mobile) that has been built into occam-pi (an extension of the classical occam language with dynamic parallelism, mobile processes and mobile channels). Barriers provide a simple way for synchronising multiple processes and are the fundamental control mechanism underlying both CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) and BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallelism). Formal semantics (through modelling in classical CSP), implementation details and early performance benchmarks (16 nanoseconds per process per barrier synchronisation on a 3.2 GHz Pentium IV) are presented, along with some likely directions for future research. Applications are outlined for the fine-grained modelling of dynamic systems, where barriers are used for maintaining simulation time and the phased execution of time steps, coordinating safe and desired patterns of communication between millions (and more) of processes. This work forms part of our TUNA project, investigating emergent properties in large dynamic systems (nanite assemblies).

Item Type: Book section
Uncontrolled keywords: barriers, events, processes, mobility, occam-pi, CSP, pi-calculus
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 76 Software, computer programming,
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Mark Wheadon
Date Deposited: 24 Nov 2008 18:02 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 09:52 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/14271 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Welch, Peter H..

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Barnes, Frederick R.M..

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