Distributed Implementations of Component-based Systems Using Source-to-source Transformations in BIP

April 1, 2011
Jaber Mohamad | Verimag Laboratory

Although distributed systems are widely used nowadays, their implementation and deployment is still a time-consuming, error-prone, and hardly predictive task. In this talk, I will present a methodology for producing automatically efficient and correct-by-construction distributed implementations by starting from a high-level model of the application software in BIP. BIP (Behavior, Interaction, Priority) is a component-based framework with formal semantics that rely on multi-party interactions for synchronizing components and dynamic priorities for scheduling between interactions. Our methodology transforms arbitrary BIP models into Send/Receive BIP models, directly implementable on distributed execution platforms. The transformation consists of (1) breaking the atomicity of actions in atomic components by replacing strong synchronizations with asynchronous Send/Receive interactions; (2) inserting several distributed controllers that coordinate the execution of interactions according to a user-defined assignment of interactions to controllers, and (3) augmenting the model with a distributed algorithm for handling distributed conflicts between controllers. The obtained Send/Receive BIP models are proven observationally equivalent to their corresponding initial models. Hence, all functional properties of the initial high-level model are preserved by construction in the implementation. Moreover, Send/Receive BIP models can be used to automatically derive distributed implementations. Currently, it is possible to generate distributed C++ implementations using (1) TCP sockets for conventional communication, (2) MPI primitives for multi-processor platforms, and (3) POSIX Threads for deployment on multi-core platforms. This method is fully implemented. I will present concrete results obtained under different scenarios (i.e., partitioning of interactions and choice of algorithm for distributed conflict resolution) and case various case studies.

Speaker Details

Mohamad Jaber is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Verimag Laboratory, where he is working in the domain of component-based design and implementation. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at Verimag Laboratory under the supervision of Professor Joseph Sifakis and his masters in Computer Science at Grenoble University. His research interests include distributed and parallel systems, source-to-source transformation, and correctness-by-construction techniques.