Nomadic pict: correct communication infrastructure for mobile computation

  • Authors:

  • Asis Unyapoth;Peter Sewell

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge;Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge

  • Venue:
  • POPL '01 Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

This paper addresses the design and verification of infrastructure for mobile computation. In particular, we study language primitives for communication between mobile agents. They can be classi ed into two groups. At a low level there are location dependent primitives that require a programmer to know the current site of a mobile agent in order to communicate with it. At a high level there are location independent primitives that allow communication with a mobile agent irrespective of any migrations. Implementation of the high level requires delicate distributed infrastructure algorithms. In earlier work with Wojciechowski and Pierce we made the two levels precise as process calculi, allowing such algorithms to be expressed as encodings of the high level into the low level; we built NOMADIC PICT, a distributed programming language for experimenting with such encodings. In this paper we turn to semantics, giving a de nition of the core language and proving correctness of an example infrastructure. This requires novel techniques: we develop equivalences that take migration into account, and reasoning principles for agents that are temporarily immobile (eg. waiting on a lock elsewhere in the system).