[Pl-seminar] 3/6: Tony Garnock-Jones, The Network as a Language Construct

[Vincent St-Amour]

NUPRL Seminar presents

Tony Garnock-Jones
NUPRL

4:30 - 6:00
Thursday, 3/6
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)


The Network as a Language Construct

The actor model inspires several important programming languages. In
this model, communicating concurrent actors collaborate to produce a
result. A pure actor language tends to turn systems into an
organization-free collection of processes, however, even though most
applications call for layered and tiered architectures. To address this
lack of an organizational principle, programmers invent design patterns.

This talk presents the results of integrating some of these basic
patterns via a programming language construct. Specifically, extending a
calculus of communicating actors with a "network" construct lets actors
conduct scoped, tiered conversations.

The resulting system, Network Calculus, makes /routing events/ an
integral part of communication. Actors react to routing event
notifications that report the comings and goings of their peers.
Such events serve to communicate changes in demand for and supply of
services within and between networks, and provide a unifying mechanism
well-suited for addressing problems of startup ordering, delimiting
session lifetimes, detecting and recovering from failure, and more.