Embedded Software — An Agenda for Research
Edward A. Lee · 1999
ions that can be used include the event-based model of Java Beans, semaphores based on Dijkstra's P/V systems [21], guarded communication [40], rendezvous, synchronous message passing, active messages [84], asynchronous message passing, streams (as in Kahn process networks [45]), dataflow (commonly used in signal and image processing), synchronous/reactive systems [10], Linda [18], and many others. These abstractions partially or completely define a model of computation, the modular organizational and operational principles of a system. Applications are built on a model of computation, whether the designer is aware of this or not. Each possibility has strengths and weaknesses. Some guarantee determinacy, some can execute in bounded memory, and some are provably free from deadlock. Different styles of concurrency are often dictated by the application, and the 6 choice of model of computation can subtly affect the choice of algorithms. While dataflow is a good match for signal processi...