Sep 21, 2006: Actors, Roles and Coordinators --- A Coordination Model for Open Distributed and Embedded Systems
Filed in: Colloquium
Dr. Shangping Ren, Illinois Institute of Technology
There are three main concerns inherent in a large scale open distributed and embedded system: dynamicity, scalability, and stringent QoS requirements. In our view, such system can be treated as a composition of concurrent computation and coerced coordination. In particular, we model concurrent computation as asynchronous and autonomous computational entities (called actors), each has its own thread of control and communicate with each other solely through asynchronous messages. In addition, at this sphere, we assume that computation proceeds under an ideal environment and resource limitation, unreliable communication, and QoS requirements, et.c, are ignored.
The reality of the environment limitations and QoS constraints required of the computation are modeled as coerced coordination imposed upon the computational entities. Similar to the computation is carried out by concurrent actors, coordination is carried by two types of concurrent coordination entities, namely, coordinators and roles. The roles in our model not only are not only abstractions for coordinated behaviors that may be shared by multiple actors, they also assume local coordination responsibilities for the actors playing the roles; whereas the coordinators are responsible for the coordination among roles. The role's behavior abstraction decouples the syntactic dependencies between the coordinators and the actors, thus shielding the behavior coordination from the dynamicity of underlying actors inherent in open distributed and embedded systems. In addition, although there can be large number of entities involved in an open system, the number of expected behaviors are in general notably smaller. Therefore, coordination based on roles are much more scalable.
In this talk, we will formally defines the behaviors of role and coordinator, and the composition of the actor computation model with the proposed coerced coordination model. Our formal study has shown that the ARC system is closed under composition and recursion.
Dr. Shangping Ren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997. Before joining IIT in 2003, she spent 6 years in industry as a senior software engineer. She was a summer research faculty fellow at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in 2006.
Currently, she leads two projects founded by U.S. National Science Foundation and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory focused on open distributed and embedded systems.
Abstract
There are three main concerns inherent in a large scale open distributed and embedded system: dynamicity, scalability, and stringent QoS requirements. In our view, such system can be treated as a composition of concurrent computation and coerced coordination. In particular, we model concurrent computation as asynchronous and autonomous computational entities (called actors), each has its own thread of control and communicate with each other solely through asynchronous messages. In addition, at this sphere, we assume that computation proceeds under an ideal environment and resource limitation, unreliable communication, and QoS requirements, et.c, are ignored.
The reality of the environment limitations and QoS constraints required of the computation are modeled as coerced coordination imposed upon the computational entities. Similar to the computation is carried out by concurrent actors, coordination is carried by two types of concurrent coordination entities, namely, coordinators and roles. The roles in our model not only are not only abstractions for coordinated behaviors that may be shared by multiple actors, they also assume local coordination responsibilities for the actors playing the roles; whereas the coordinators are responsible for the coordination among roles. The role's behavior abstraction decouples the syntactic dependencies between the coordinators and the actors, thus shielding the behavior coordination from the dynamicity of underlying actors inherent in open distributed and embedded systems. In addition, although there can be large number of entities involved in an open system, the number of expected behaviors are in general notably smaller. Therefore, coordination based on roles are much more scalable.
In this talk, we will formally defines the behaviors of role and coordinator, and the composition of the actor computation model with the proposed coerced coordination model. Our formal study has shown that the ARC system is closed under composition and recursion.
Bio
Dr. Shangping Ren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997. Before joining IIT in 2003, she spent 6 years in industry as a senior software engineer. She was a summer research faculty fellow at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in 2006.
Currently, she leads two projects founded by U.S. National Science Foundation and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory focused on open distributed and embedded systems.