A Topological Approach to Distributed Computing
Luigia Petre, Kaisa Sere, Marina Waldén · Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science · 2000
In several state-based approaches to distributed computing, e.g., action systems, or UNITY, the computing nodes are commonly left unspecified or implicit. For instance, an action system comes with an informal description on how the system is supposed to be mapped into the network. The purpose of this paper is to make this mapping explicit so that we are provided with means on the language level to reason about the location of a system in a network. We define the notion of a topological action system that carries with it information about its location within the network. The action system itself can model some active execution or merely a repository of data or any combination of these. We also show how our approach leads to action systems with data and/or code mobility. This work has been supported by the Academy of Finland. We would like to thank the anonymous referees for their useful comments on the first version of this paper.