Colloquium Computer Science, Professor Farhad Arbab (CWI)

Title: Coordinated Composition of Components

Abstract:

Modeling components as units of behavior offers a rich framework where composition operators can coordinate the behavior of such constituents into the behavior of arbitrarily more complex systems. Our work on Reo, its semantics, and tools serves as a concrete instance of such a framework. The emphasis in Reo is on the externally observable behavior of components and their coordinated composition into more complex concurrent systems. This emphasis highlights the eminent role of protocols in concurrent systems of components and services, and makes concurrency protocols the central focus in Reo.

At its core, Reo proffers an interaction-based model of concurrency where more complex protocols result from composition of simpler, and eventually primitive, protocols. In Reo, combining a small set of user-defined synchronous and asynchronous primitives, in a manner that resembles construction of electronic circuits from gates and elements, yields arbitrarily complex concurrency protocols. Semantics of Reo preserves synchrony and exclusion through composition. This form of compositionality makes specification of protocols in Reo simpler than in conventional models and languages, which offer low-level synchronization constructs (e.g., locks, semaphores, monitors, synchronous methods). Moreover, the high-level constructs and abstractions in Reo also leave more room for compilers to perform novel optimizations in mapping protocol specifications to lower-level instructions that implement them. In on-going work we currently develop code generators that produce executables whose performance and scalability on multi-core platforms compare favorably with hand-crafted, hand-optimized code.

Colloquium coordinators are Prof.dr. M. Aiello (e-mail : M.Aiello rug.nl ) and
Prof.dr. M. Biehl (e-mail: M.Biehl rug.nl )

http://www.rug.nl/research/jbi/news/colloquia/computerscience