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It is the good reader that makes the good book. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Society & Solitude. In the course of two projects, the author of this book was involved in the design of the platforms PARFORM [CS93) and LOLA [Cap94), [CS) for the support of parallel computing in distributed systems. The former system was geared towards the highly efficient use of idle resources in networks of workstations, and the latter system was intended as a scalability study: How many workstations in the global Internet can be used simultaneously for solving a massively parallel problem? In one of the experiments conducted with these systems, up to 800 workstations on all five continents were cooperating for the solution of a search problem from molecular biology [Cap94). The most important lessons which the author was forced to learn during the course of these projects were not to rely on any documentation of network-and low-level system-calls, to use neither common sense nor mathematical logic during the design of a large distributed system, but to be happy with a working program, and not to ask, why it would work.
List of contents
1 Introduction.- 1.1 What is a Process? - An Introduction.- 1.2 Process Theory as Research Area.- 1.3 Elements of Process Theory.- 1.4 Classification of Process Theories.- 1.5 How to Use This Book? - A Reading Guide.- 2 Transition Systems.- 2.1 Ordinary Transition Systems.- 2.2 Interpreting Transition Systems.- 2.3 Typed and Labeled Systems.- 2.4 Non-Determinism, Causality, and Behaviour.- 2.5 Sequential Composition.- 2.6 Fairness.- 3 Distributed Transition Systems.- 3.1 Motivation.- 3.2 Distributed Transition Systems.- 3.3 Non-Determinism, Causality, and Behaviour.- 3.4 Examples of Branching Structures.- 3.5 Branching Structure and Constructions.- 3.6 Branching Structure and Geometry.- 3.7 Confusion.- 3.8 First Order Transition Systems.- 3.9 Fairness.- 4 Higher Order Transition Systems.- 4.1 Motivation.- 4.2 Higher Order Transition Systems.- 4.3 Reversible and Invertible Transitions.- 4.4 Forgetting the Higher Order Structure.- 5 Process Specification Formalisms.- 5.1 Linear Logic and Transition Systems.- 5.2 Linear Logic Process Specification.- 5.3 Extensions of the Formalism.- 5.4 Equivalence and Abstraction for Processes.- 6 Examples.- 6.1 A Specification Language.- 6.2 The Stack.- 6.3 The Bag.- 6.4 Interrupts.- 6.5 Data Replication.- 6.6 The Alternating Bit Protocol.- 6.7 Workflow Management.- 6.8 Fibonacci Numbers.- 6.9 An Implementation.- 7 Categorical Interpretations.- 7.1 The Curry-Howard Correspondence.- 7.2 Transition Systems.- 7.3 Linear Logic.- 8 Conclusions, Challenges, and Opportunities.- 8.1 What Has Been Achieved?.- 8.2 Theoretical Problems.- 8.3 Practical Problems.- 8.4 Speculations.- 8.5 Final Remarks.- A Mathematical Prerequisites.- A.1 Order Structures.- A.2 Monoids.- B Linear Logic.- B.1 Universe of Discourse.- B.2 Motivations for LinearLogic.- B.3 Syntax and Natural Deduction.- B.4 Alternate Natural Deduction.- B.5 Sequent Calculus.- B.6 Syntactic Results.- B.7 Interpretation of Linear Formulae.- C Category Theory.- C.1 Category Theory for the Perplexed.- C.2 Basic Definitions.- C.3 Products, Coproducts, and Duality.- C.4 Functors.- C.5 Natural Transformations.- C.6 Properties of the Product Functor.- C.7 Representation of Categories.- C.8 Cartesian Closed Categories.- C.9 Symmetric Monoidal Closed Categories.- Symbols.
About the author
Prof.Dr. Clemens H. Cap, Universität Rostock
