Towards Abstractions For Distributed Systems
Martin Berger, Kohei Honda · 2004
For historical, sociological and technical reasons, -calculi have been the dominant theoretical paradigm in the study of functional computation. Similarly, but to a lesser degree, -calculi dominate advanced mathematical accounts of concurrency. Alas, and despite its ever increasing ubiquity, an equally convincing formal foundation for distributed computing has not been forthcoming. This thesis seek to contribute towards ameliorating that omission. To this end, guided by the assumption that distributed computing is concurrent computing with partial failures of various kinds, we extend the asynchronous -calculus with a notion of sites, the possibility of site failure, a persistence mechanism to deal with site failures, the distinction between inter-site and intra-site communication, the possibility of message loss in inter-site communication and a timer construct, as is often used in distributed algorithms to deal with various failure scenarios.