ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Formal verification of parallel programs
Communications of the ACM
SFM: synchronizing forms manager
Proceedings of the 1986 ACM SIGSMALL/PC symposium on Small systems
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
The original motivation for this paper came from an attempt to find a model for office systems which could be used to provide the basis for either an implementation or simulation. It was realized that the office is just an instance of a distributed system, so instead a model for this larger set of systems was sought. Five major components were identified that are necessary to model the processing of a unit of work or a job in a distributed environment: 1. a structural model for each procedure or function provided in a distributed system, 2. a structural model of the control program that directs the processing of an individual job, 3. the status of a job (including both its control and data state), 4. global information accessible to all jobs and functions in the system, 5. data files (whose usage may be restricted and therefore do not represent global information). This paper describes a model which can be used to depict the control and information flow of a job in a distributed processing environment. The basic technique that is used employs individual Petri nets to describe each of the procedures that a unit of work must invoke. In addition, a so-called “control” Petri net is used to model the equivalent of a control program for a job which has the responsibility for overseeing the execution of procedures available in the distributed system.