Communicating Process Architectures 2009

This book is a collection of the papers presented at the 32nd Communicating Process Architecture conference (CPA), held at the Technical University Eindhoven, the Netherlands, from the 1st to the 4th of November 2009. Concurrency is a fundamental mechanism of the universe, existing in all structures and at all levels of granularity. To be useful in this universe, any computer system has to model and reflect an appropriate level of abstraction. For simplicity, therefore, the system needs to be concurrent -- so that this modeling is obvious and correct. Today, the commercial reality of multicore processors means that concurrency issues can no longer be ducked if applications are going to be able to exploit more than an ever-diminishing fraction of their power. This is a second, but very forceful, reason to take this subject seriously. We need theory and programming technology that turns this around and makes concurrency an elementary part of the everyday toolkit of every software engineer. This is what these proceedings are all about. Subjects covered in this volume include: system design and implementation for both hardware and software; tools for concurrent programming languages, libraries and run-time kernels; and formal methods and applications.