High level communication primitives for concurrent systems

Abstract

To support high-level specification and analysis of distributed systems, the authors propose two constructs: handshake and unit. The handshake construct is a remote procedure call generalized for multiple parties. The unit construct has three functions: to restrict the possible calls to various handshake procedures, to provide a synchronization mechanism, and to specify computation that is directly relevant to communication. These constructs are part of a formal model called the synchronous token based communicating state (STOCS) model, which lends itself to automatic analysis. These constructs can be added to any existing language easily, and the current system, called ConC (Concurrent C), extends C for concurrent programming. A prototype of the system runs on a Sun cluster operating under Unix 4.2 BSD.<>