Detecting stable properties of networks in concurrent logic programming languages
Vijay Saraswat, Ken Kahn, David Weinbaum · 1988
A significant motivation for programming language research is to find good abstractions and conceptual frameworks that enable us to understand and re* son about, certain kinds of complex computational phenomena in a simple way.In this paper we show that the specification of programs for the detection of stable properties of networks of communicating processes is facilitated -almost trivialized -in the framework of concurrent logic programming languages.We present the embedded short-circuit pr* gramming technique for detecting stable properties of networks, and illustrate its utility by providing a simple algorithm for distributed termination detection.We show that, the runtime behavior of a concurrent logic program incorporating this technique (for diffusing computations) is similar to the "DSA" scheme described in [7] for maintaining distributed counters.We modify the technique for repeated detection of quiescence for phased computations such as discrete simulations.We show that the abstraction can be mit nipulated without reference to its implementation by presenting a simple solution to the distributed knotdetection problem [IS].Finally we show that, under certain conditions, a simple extension allows repeated (live) snapshots [3] of the state of the computation to be taken almost trivially, thus providing another technique for detecting stable properties.