Behavioural Types for Actor Systems

Recent mainstream programming languages such as Erlang or Scala have renewed the interest on the Actor model of concurrency. However, the literature on the static analysis of actor systems is still lacking of mature formal methods. In this paper we present a minimal actor calculus that takes as primitive the basic constructs of Scala's Actors API. More precisely, actors can send asynchronous messages, process received messages according to a pattern matching mechanism, and dynamically create new actors, whose scope can be extruded by passing actor names as message parameters. Drawing inspiration from the linear types and session type theories developed for process calculi, we put forward a behavioural type system that addresses the key issues of an actor calculus. We then study a safety property dealing with the determinism of finite actor com- munication. More precisely, we show that well typed and balanced actor systems are (i) deadlock-free and (ii) any message will eventually be handled by the target actor, and dually no actor will indefinitely wait for an expected messag

Logical Characterizations of Behavioral Relations on Transition Systems of Probability Distributions

Probabilistic nondeterministic processes are commonly modeled as probabilistic LTSs (PLTSs). A number of logical characterizations of the main behavioral relations on PLTSs have been studied. In particular, Parma and Segala [2007] and Hermanns et al. [2011] define a probabilistic Hennessy-Milner logic interpreted over probability distributions, whose corresponding logical equivalence/preorder when restricted to Dirac distributions coincide with standard bisimulation/simulation between the states of a PLTS. This result is here extended by studying the full logical equivalence/preorder between (possibly non-Dirac) distributions in terms of a notion of bisimulation/simulation defined on a LTS whose states are distributions (dLTS). We show that the well-known spectrum of behavioral relations on nonprobabilistic LTSs as well as their corresponding logical characterizations in terms of Hennessy-Milner logic scales to the probabilistic setting when considering dLTSs

Actors vs Shared Memory: two models at work on Big Data application frameworks

This work aims at analyzing how two different concurrency models, namely the shared memory model and the actor model, can influence the development of applications that manage huge masses of data, distinctive of Big Data applications. The paper compares the two models by analyzing a couple of concrete projects based on the MapReduce and Bulk Synchronous Parallel algorithmic schemes. Both projects are doubly implemented on two concrete platforms: Akka Cluster and Managed X10. The result is both a conceptual comparison of models in the Big Data Analytics scenario, and an experimental analysis based on concrete executions on a cluster platform

A Logic for True Concurrency

We propose a logic for true concurrency whose formulae predicate about events in computations and their causal dependencies. The induced logical equivalence is hereditary history preserving bisimilarity, and fragments of the logic can be identified which correspond to other true concurrent behavioural equivalences in the literature: step, pomset and history preserving bisimilarity. Standard Hennessy-Milner logic, and thus (interleaving) bisimilarity, is also recovered as a fragment. We also propose an extension of the logic with fixpoint operators, thus allowing to describe causal and concurrency properties of infinite computations. We believe that this work contributes to a rational presentation of the true concurrent spectrum and to a deeper understanding of the relations between the involved behavioural equivalences.Comment: 31 pages, a preliminary version appeared in CONCUR 201

The role of concurrency in an evolutionary view of programming abstractions

In this paper we examine how concurrency has been embodied in mainstream programming languages. In particular, we rely on the evolutionary talking borrowed from biology to discuss major historical landmarks and crucial concepts that shaped the development of programming languages. We examine the general development process, occasionally deepening into some language, trying to uncover evolutionary lineages related to specific programming traits. We mainly focus on concurrency, discussing the different abstraction levels involved in present-day concurrent programming and emphasizing the fact that they correspond to different levels of explanation. We then comment on the role of theoretical research on the quest for suitable programming abstractions, recalling the importance of changing the working framework and the way of looking every so often. This paper is not meant to be a survey of modern mainstream programming languages: it would be very incomplete in that sense. It aims instead at pointing out a number of remarks and connect them under an evolutionary perspective, in order to grasp a unifying, but not simplistic, view of the programming languages development process

Causality in concurrent systems

Concurrent systems identify systems, either software, hardware or even biological systems, that are characterized by sets of independent actions that can be executed in any order or simultaneously. Computer scientists resort to a causal terminology to describe and analyse the relations between the actions in these systems. However, a thorough discussion about the meaning of causality in such a context has not been developed yet. This paper aims to fill the gap. First, the paper analyses the notion of causation in concurrent systems and attempts to build bridges with the existing philosophical literature, highlighting similarities and divergences between them. Second, the paper analyses the use of counterfactual reasoning in ex-post analysis in concurrent systems (i.e. execution trace analysis).Comment: This is an interdisciplinary paper. It addresses a class of causal models developed in computer science from an epistemic perspective, namely in terms of philosophy of causalit

Name-passing calculi and crypto-primitives: A survey

The paper surveys the literature on high-level name-passing process calculi, and their extensions with cryptographic primitives. The survey is by no means exhaustive, for essentially two reasons. First, in trying to provide a coherent presentation of different ideas and techniques, one inevitably ends up leaving out the approaches that do not fit the intended roadmap. Secondly, the literature on the subject has been growing at very high rate over the years. As a consequence, we decided to concentrate on few papers that introduce the main ideas, in the hope that discussing them in some detail will provide sufficient insight for further reading

Secrecy in Untrusted Networks

We investigate the protection of migrating agents against the untrusted sites they traverse. The resulting calculus provides a formal framework to reason about protection policies and security protocols over distributed, mobile infrastructures, and aims to stand to ambients as the spi calculus stands to ?. We present a type system that separates trusted and untrusted data and code, while allowing safe interactions with untrusted sites. We prove that the type system enforces a privacy property, and show the expressiveness of the calculus via examples and an encoding of the spi calculus

Compositional Event Structure Semantics of the Internal pi-Calculus

Accepté à CONCUR 2007International audienceWe propose the first compositional event structure semantics for a fully expressive pi-calculus, generalising Winskel's event structures for CCS. The pi-calculus we model is the piI-calculus with recursive definitions and summations. First we model the synchronous calculus, introducing a notion of dynamic renaming to the standard operators on event structures. Then we model the asynchronous calculus, for which a new additional operator, called rooting, is necessary for representing causality due to new name binding. The semantics are shown to be operationally adequate and sound with respect to bisimulation

Computing from LaTeX: automated numerical computing from LaTeX expressions

We present CfL (Computing from LaTeX), a software tool that allows the user to automatically perform numerical computation without any programming activity. The user has just to express his computational problem in the usual mathematical language found in written books, and to typeset it using \latex for a well-formatted printout. CfL is designed so that it parses a LaTeX document to recognize well-defined computational problems. An executable Python script is then automatically generated so that mathematical objects are encoded as Python data objects, and the script's logic reflects an appropriate numerical solution pattern for the recognized computational problem. The results of the numerical computations can also be automatically inserted in a resulting LaTeX document so to be displayed by means of tables and graphics. Therefore, CfL is a numerical problem-solving environment that converts the specification of a mathematical problem into an appropriate resolution pattern that can be directly executed. The use of high-level mathematical abstractions, the familiar LaTeX typesetting and the automated code generation are key design choices that provide ease-of-use and explorative computation, with a negligible overhead