Communicating Process Architectures 2004

Communicating Process Architecture (CPA) describes an approach to system development that is process-oriented. It makes no great distinction between hardware and software. It has a major root in the theory of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). However, the underlying theory is not limited to CSP. The importance of mobility of both channel and process within a network sees integration with ideas from the ð-calculus. Other formalisms are also exploited, such as BSP and MPI. The focus is on sound methods for the engineering of significant concurrent systems, including those that are distributed (across the Internet or within a single chip) and/or software-scheduled on a single execution unit. Traditionally, at CPA, the emphasis has been on theory and practice - developing and applying tools based upon CSP and related theories to build high-integrity systems of significant size. In particular, interest focuses on achieving scalability and security against error. The development of Java, C, and C++, libraries to facilitate secure concurrent programming using 'mainstream' languages has allowed CPA to continue and proliferate. This work continues in support of the engineering of distributed applications. Recently, there has been greater reference to theory and its more direct application to programming systems and languages. In this volume the formal CSP is very well presented. The papers provide a healthy mixture of the academic and commercial, software and hardware, application and infrastructure, which reflects the nature of the discipline.

The awareness of the ideas characterized by Communicating Processes Architecture and their adoption by industry beyond their traditional base in safety-critical systems and security is growing. The complexity of modern computing systems has become so great that no one person – maybe not even a small team – can understand all aspects and all interactions. The only hope of making such systems work is to ensure that all components are correct by design and that the components can be combined to achieve scalability. A crucial property is that the cost of making a change to a system depends linearly on the size of that change – not on the size of the system being changed. Of course, this must be true whether that change is a matter of maintenance (e.g. to take advantage of upcoming multiprocessor hardware) or the addition of new functionality. One key is that system composition (and disassembly) introduces no surprises. A component must behave consistently, no matter the context in which it is used – which means that component interfaces must be explicit, published and free from hidden side-effect. This publication offers strongly refereed high-quality papers covering many differing aspects: system design and implementation (for both hardware and software), tools (concurrent programming languages, libraries and run-time kernels), formal methods and applications.

Deals with Computer Science and models of Concurrency. This title emphasizes on hardware/software co-design and the understanding of concurrency that results from these systems. It includes a range of papers on this topic, from the formal modeling of buses in co-design systems through to software simulation and development environments.

This publication contains papers from the Communicating Process Architectures 2006 conference, held at Napier University in Edinburgh. It is perhaps appropriate that a meeting concerning simple ways of designing, implementing and reasoning about concurrent systems should be held in an institution named after the inventor of a simple, and highly concurrent, adding machine. The house in which John Napier lived forms part of the campus where the meeting was held. The papers are very varied and wide ranging and subjects include various aspects of communicating process theory and their application to designing and building systems. One of the hottest current topics – safe and effective programming models for multicore processors (e.g. IBM’s Cell) – has a natural home in this community and is addressed. Other papers include a case study on large scale formal development and verification, CSP mechanisms for Microsoft’s .NET framework, parallel systems on embedded and mobile devices, modern link technology (‘SpaceWire’), various applications of occam, JCSP and JCSP.net (video processing, robotics, massive multiplayer gaming, material and biological modeling, etc.), visual design languages and tools for CSP and real-time systems, new process oriented programming and design environments, new developments of the Transterpreter, efficient cluster computing and the debugging of message-passing systems.

"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."--

Communicating Process Architectures 2008 contains the proceedings of the thirty-first Communicating Process Architectures Conference (CPA 2008) organized under the auspices of WoTUG and the Department of Computer Science of the University of York. The aim of this book is to cover both theoretical aspects and industrial applications of Communicating Processes. Two invited speakers have given excellent contributions to this topic. Professor Samson Abramsky has worked in the areas of semantics and logic of computation, and concurrency. His work on game semantics considers interaction and information flow between multiple agents and their environment. This has yielded new approaches to compositional model-checking and to analysis for programs with state, concurrency, probability, and other features. Professor Colin O'Halloran has been instrumental in the uptake of formal methods in the development and verification of high assurance systems on an industrial scale. His research interests are in automating the use of formal methods and using these techniques at reasonable cost and on an industrial scale.

This book presents the proceedings of two conferences, the 37th and 38th in the WoTUG series; Communicating Process Architectures (CPA) 2015, held in Canterbury, England, in August 2015, and CPA 2016, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in August 2016. Fifteen papers were accepted for presentation at the 2015 conference. They cover a spectrum of concurrency concerns: mathematical theory, programming languages, design and support tools, verification, multicore infrastructure and applications ranging from supercomputing to embedded. Three workshops and two evening fringe sessions also formed part of the conference, and the workshop position papers and fringe abstracts are included in this book. Fourteen papers covering the same broad spectrum of topics were presented at the 2016 conference, one of them in the form of a workshop. They are all included here, together with abstracts of the five fringe sessions from the conference.

Concurrent and parallel systems are intrinsic to the technology which underpins almost every aspect of our lives today. This book presents the combined post-proceedings for two important conferences on concurrent and parallel systems: Communicating Process Architectures 2017, held in Sliema, Malta, in August 2017, and Communicating Process Architectures 2018, held in Dresden, Germany, in August 2018. CPA 2017: Fifteen papers were accepted for presentation and publication, they cover topics including mathematical theory, programming languages, design and support tools, verification, and multicore infrastructure and applications ranging from supercomputing to embedded. A workshop on domain-specific concurrency skeletons and the abstracts of eight fringe presentations reporting on new ideas, work in progress or interesting thoughts associated with concurrency are also included in these proceedings. CPA 2018: Eighteen papers were accepted for presentation and publication, they cover topics including mathematical theory, design and programming language and support tools, verification, multicore run-time infrastructure, and applications at all levels from supercomputing to embedded. A workshop on translating CSP-based languages to common programming languages and the abstracts of four fringe presentations on work in progress, new ideas, as well as demonstrations and concerns that certain common practices in concurrency are harmful are also included in these proceedings. The book will be of interest to all those whose work involves concurrent and parallel systems.