Coordination Languages and Models for Open Distributed Systems

摘要

Programming open distributed systems will be of rapidly growing importance in the coming decades to the scientists and engineers that will be using these techniques to solve society's most pressing problems. Even today, the authors see a growing number of critical applications such as MRI spin relaxometry, gene sequence analysis, climate modeling, and molecular modeling of potential bioactive compounds that require massive amounts of computation. The demands for intensive computational power will only grow in the future, as society tackles more complex problems. Existing concurrent programming languages are not well-suited to the development of open distributed systems. Middleware technologies provide the support for the development of open distributed systems. However, the technologies suffer the same problems of existing concurrent programming approaches which the software evolution of the systems are not supported well. The resulting systems are difficult to maintain due to the changes. This has led to the design and implementation of a variety of coordination models and languages for open distributed systems. The main purpose is to separate the concerns of the complexities including communication, coordination, computation, and heterogeneity in the development of open distributed systems. The models manage the concerns to improve the maintenance of the systems.