Concurrency Seminar

Bertrand Meyer and Arnaud Bailly, Summer semester 2004

Announcements

2 April 2004:

• Send a choice of 3 papers that would would like to present:
  To: arnaud.bailly@inf.ethz.ch
  Subject: Concurrency Seminar Choice of Articles
  Content: the 3 papers that would interest you the most to present in the seminar, numbered 1 to 3, by order of preference (1 the highest).
  You will only present one paper, we ask for three because we will need to solve possible conflicts in choices.
  The date of each presentation will be negociated with the seminar organizers.
  This date will mostly depend on the presented paper.

2 April 2004:

• Register to the seminar: Please send an email
  To: concur-seminar@se.inf.ethz.ch
  Subject: Concurrency Seminar Participant
  Content:
  • Your name
  • Preferred email address
  • Status: Diplom student (what semester), Ph.D. student, other.
  • Taking the course for credit or not.
  • Attach a picture (JPEG, GIF, PNG) if you wish.

Description

Title and Code

Concurrency Seminar
Course code: 251-0270-00

Scope

The seminar will provide an overview of current research topics in concurrent and distributed programming, with particular emphasis on object-oriented methods. During the semester, each student attending the seminar will make a presentation on one topic of his or her choice (among a set of proposed ones).

Prerequisites

There is no formal prerequisite, but we recommend to follow the course "Concurrent Object Oriented Programming", code 37-268.

Topics

• Concurrent and distributed programming models and languages.
• Formal models of concurrency.
• Distributed algorithms.
• Middleware and components, mobility of code.
• Static analysis and deadlock avoidance in concurrent programs.
• Design methods and notations for distributed software.
• Fault tolerance and replication.
• Security for distributed software.
• Object-orientation issues: inheritance, typing, distributed garbage collection.

The literature for presentations covering those topics is given below.

Companion Course

Concurrent Object Oriented Programming, 251-0268-00 , Tuesdays 13.00 - 16.00 RZ F21.

Schedule

• Tuesdays 16.00 - 17.00, IFW C42.

Office hours: Thursday 14.15-16.00, or by appointment, RZ-J3.

  Program

 Literature for presentations

The following articles will serve as a basis for technical presentations in the seminar. The goal of each presentation is to describe the main contributions achieved in one article, and to place them back in context. To do so, each student will be assigned a tutor that will help him or her during the reading process.

You may need Acrobat Reader or GSview (on windows only, Ghostview works fine on Unix-like systems).

Formal models, static analysis, and foundations:

• G. Cécé, A. Finkel, and S. Purushothaman Iyer. Unreliable channels are easier to verify than perfect channels. Information and Computation, 124(1):20-31, 1996. Already attributed.
• Chandrasekhar Boyapati, Robert Lee, Martin Rinard. Ownership Types for Safe Programming: Preventing Data Races and Deadlocks. ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2002), Seattle, Washington, November 2002.
• Erika Ábrahám, Frank S. de Boer, Willem-Paul de Roever and Martin Steffen. Inductive Proof Outlines for Monitors in Java. Proc. of Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems (FMOODS'03), LNCS 2884, Springer-Verlag, 2003.
• A. Vallecillo, V. T. Vasconcelos, and A. Ravara. Typing the behavior of objects and components using session types. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 68(3), 2003. Presented at FOCLASA'02.
• Catuscia Palamidessi. Comparing the expressive power of the Synchronous and the Asynchronous pi-calculus. Proc. of the 24th ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'97), pages 256-265, ACM Press, 1997.
• T. D. Chandra and S.Toueg, Unreliable failure detectors for reliable distributed systems. Journal of the ACM, 43(2): 225 - 267, ACM Press, March 1996.
• M. Herlihy and J. Wing,   Linearizability: a correctness condition for concurrent objects. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS),  12(3): 463 - 492, ACM Press, July 1990.

Concurrent and distributed objects:

• Cédric Fournet, Cosimo Laneve, Luc Maranget and Didier Rémy.  Inheritance in the Join Calculus . Proc. of Conf. on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FST TCS'00), LNCS 1974, Springer-Verlag, 2000.
• Jörg Kienzle, Rachid Guerraoui: AOP: Does It Make Sense? The Case of Concurrency and Failures. Proc. of ECOOP'2002, LNCS 2374, Springer-Verlag, 2002.
• Peter R. Pietzuch, Brian Shand, and Jean Bacon. A Framework for Event Composition in Distributed Systems. Proc. of the 4th ACM/IFIP/USENIX Int. Conf. on Middleware (Middleware'03),  2003. Springer.
• Oscar Nierstrasz. Regular Types for Active Objects. Chapter 4 of the book Object-Oriented Software Composition. Prentice Hall International, 1995. The book is available on-line here.
• Luca de Alfaro and Thomas A. Henzinger.  Interface automata. Proceedings of the 8th European software engineering conference,  ACM Press, 1999.
• B. Nielsen and G. Agha. Towards Reusable Real-Time Objects. Annals of Software Engineering: Special Volume on Real-Time Software Engineering, vol. 7, pp 257-282, 1999.

Middleware, Components, Web Services, and Peer-to-Peer:

• Oscar Nierstrasz and Franz Achermann. A Calculus for Modeling Software Components, Proc. of FMCO'2002, LNCS 2852, Springer-Verlag, 2003.
• S. Frolund and J. Koisten.  QML: A Language for Quality of Service Specification. HP Tech. Report, 1998.N.
• N. Busi, A. Manfredini, A. Montresor and G. Zavattaro. PeerSpaces: Data-driven Coordination in Peer-to-Peer Networks. In Proc. of ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC'03), ACM Press, 2003. Already attributed.  
• N. Parlavantzas, G. Coulson, G.S. Blair. An Extensible Binding Framework for Component-Based Middleware, Proc. of  7th Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC'2003), IEEE Computer Society, 2003.
• R. Marvie, P. Merle, J.-M. Geib and S. Leblanc. TORBA: Trading Contracts for CORBA. In Proc. of the 6th USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS'01), 2001.
• L. Bocchi, C. Laneve, G. Zavattaro. A Calculus for Long-running Transactions. In Proc. of Sixth IFIP Int. Conf. on Formal Methods for Open-Object Based Distributed Systems (FMOODS'03), 124-138
  LNCS 2884, Springer-Verlag, 2003.
• M. Astley, D. C. Sturman, G. Agha: Customizable middleware for modular distributed software. Communications of the ACM 44(5): 99-107, 2001. Already attributed.
• P. Felber, R. Guerraoui, and A. Schiper. Replication of CORBA Objects. In Proc. of Advances in Distributed Systems, LNCS 1752, pp. 254-276, Springer-Verlag, 2000.
• A. Sánchez, L. Veiga and P. Ferreira. Distributed Garbage Collection for Wide Area Replicated Memory. In Proc. of the  6th USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS'01), San Antonio (USA), January 2001. Already attributed.

Languages:

• L. Cardelli.  A language with distributed scope. Computing Systems, 8(1):27-59, January 1995. Already attributed.
• J. Riely and M. Hennessy. A Typed Language for Distributed Mobile Processes.  In Proc. of the 25th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'98), pp. 378-390, ACM Press, 1998.
• P. T. Wojciechowski and P. Sewell. Nomadic Pict: Language and Infrastructure Design for Mobile Agents. In Proc. of First International Symposium on Agent Systems and Applications/Third International Symposium on Mobile Agents (ASA/MA'99),  1999.
• P. Van Roy, S. Haridi, P. Brand, G. Smolka, M. Mehl, and Ralf Scheidhauer.  Mobile Objects in Distributed Oz.   ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS),  19(5): 804 - 851, ACM Press, September 1997.

Security:

• G. Boudol and I. Castellani.  Non-interference for concurrent programs. In Proc. of International Colloquium  on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP'01), LNCS 2076, Springer-Verlag, 2001.
• A. Gordon and M. Abadi.   A Calculus for Cryptographic Protocols: The Spi Calculus. In Proc. of the Fourth ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM Press, pages 36-47, April 1997.

Contacts

• Send all email relative to this seminar to concur-seminar (at...) se.inf.ethz.ch. It will reach the professors and assistants that are in charge of it. Do not use their personal addresses or your message may be missed.
• Contact person for the seminar: Arnaud Bailly (http://se.inf.ethz.ch/people/bailly, Office: RZ-J3)
• Webmaster: Click arnaud.bailly (at also...) se.inf.ethz.ch.