View-centric reasoning for Linda and Tuple Space computation
Marc L. Smith, Rebecca J. Parsons, Charles E. Hughes · IEE Proceedings - Software · 2003
In contrast to sequential computation, concurrent computation gives rise to parallel events. Efforts to translate the history of concurrent computations into sequential event traces result in the potential uncertainty of the observed order of these events. Loosely coupled distributed systems complicate this uncertainty even further by introducing the element of multiple imperfect observers of these parallel events. Properties of such systems are difficult to reason about and, in some cases, attempts to prove safety or liveness lead to ambiguities. The authors present a survey of challenges of reasoning about properties of concurrent systems. They then propose a new approach, view-centric reasoning, that avoids the problem of translating concurrency into a sequential representation. Finally, they demonstrate the usefulness of view-centric reasoning as a framework for disambiguating the meaning of Tuple Space predicate operations, versions of which exist commercially in IBM's T Spaces and Sun's JavaSpaces.