DVispatch: a visual language with distributed rewriting

Abstract

Our figure rewriting visual language is extended by a general method so that it rewrites figures distributed on multiple hosts. With this language, network applications or distributed systems can be built simply by drawing figures as a graphical code on a single host. At run time, the code is partitioned according to the number of target hosts and distributed on them. The partitioned code then starts running distributively and asynchronously, so as to simulate, as a whole, the behaviour of the code in the original single host language. Conversely speaking, a programmer can design and test the distributed behaviour of the program by working on the code on a single host. With rewriting rules reflecting the locality of operations, describing distributed systems in such a visual geometrical language makes it easy to grasp the topological structure of their algorithm. Furthermore, geometrical coding of distributed resources enables finer grained control of resources than the conventional models.