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croquet
-- a collaborative project that is creating the next generation of distributed collaborative computing spaces
Models of Computation References
(The links below are from a
collaborative website created by Mark Guzdial at the
Georgia Institute of Technology)
This page is designed to capture reading material on parallel and
distributed programming constructs, which permit people to run a
collaborative application on many computers at once, often separated by
non-trivial network delays. Please upload or link any references you
find.
Synchronous/Reactive Programming
A reactive programming language is designed (mostly) for hardware or embedded software. The fundamental idea is that computation takes zero time, and all message sends take time 1. This means that messages are delivered between
clock ticks, and so no message reception can interrupt computation. In
other words, no race conditions...well, mostly. If global variables are
permitted we can get race conditions on updates to global variables.
Security, Safety, and Event Ordering
The E programming language focussed on providing a safe and useable distributed programming environment. See http://www.erights.org for a discussion. There are two fundamentally new structures in E:
- Promise pipelining http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/ewalnut.html#SEC20 which creates a data structure representing the eventual return from a remote message. This can be used to pipeline computations based on the result of a send
- Object capabilities, which separate authentication from authorization and only permit code to perform actions specifically authorized.
A draft Croquet Security Requirements Suggestions has been created to encourage development of a shared view of Croquet security needs before the meeting. A follow-on Higher Ed Security Scenario
has been added as a discussion element, as it has become apparent that
the university applications of Croquet have more severe security
requirements than originally appreciated.
Models of Computation
Edward Lee of UC-Berkeley observed that most parallel programming
differed in the way in which parallel programs exchanged data, sent
messages, blocked and unblocked computation. He created a (by now,
voluminous) executable library of such "models of computation",
together with editors and debuggers. This impressive piece of work can
be found in the Ptolemy II project http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/ptolemyII/. The best summary of Ptolemy II comes from its FAQ: The
Ptolemy project studies modeling, simulation, and design of concurrent,
real-time, embedded systems. The focus is on assembly of concurrent
components. The key underlying principle in the project is the use of
well-defined models of computation that govern the interactions between
components. A major problem area being addressed is the use of
heterogeneous mixtures of models of computation.
Distributed Objects and Croquet
Croquet is a programming and user environment for wide-area distributed systems based on David Reed's notion of distributed objects. The summary, copied directly from Alan Kay's attached description (Time_Late-Bound.doc), is:
Croquet's treatment of distributed computation assumes a truly large
scale distributed computing platform, con-sisting of heterogeneous
computing devices distributed throughout a planet-scale communications
network. Ap-plications are expected to span machines and involve many
users. In contrast with the more traditional architec-tures we grew up
with, Croquet incorporates replication of computation (both objects and
activity), and the idea of active shared subspaces in its basic
interpreter model. More traditional distributed systems replicate data,
but try very hard not to replicate computation. But, it is often easier
and more efficient to send the computation to the data, rather than the
other way round. Consequently, Croquet is defined so that replication
of computations is just as easy as replication of data.
See http://croquetproject.org for more comprehensive information about the Croquet project, including many screenshots.
Time_Late-Bound.doc
(I don't suppose some kind soul could convert this document into
something a bit more accessible for those of us who don't have Word? --
Frank Shearar)
Time_Late-Bound.pdf (I happened to be converting several other docs to pdf, so I converted this while I was there -- Marc Stiegler)
croquetSecurityRequirements.txt
croquetSecurityRequirementsHigherEd.txt
Presentations:
Presentation at the HP Workshop on Advanced Software Technologies at HP Labs, Palo Alto, July 20-22.
Concurrent Models of Computation (Powerpoint presentation)
Habitat Redux: New Lessons from the Virtual Outback
http://www.fudco.com/habitat/Habit
atRedux.ppt
Promise Pipelining: Distributed Programming Made Practical
http://www.erights.org/talks/promises/index.html (Powerpoint 2002 or later)
Building a Virus-Safe Platform: Don't add security, remove insecurity
http://www.erights.org/talks/virus-safe/index.html (Powerpoint 2002 or later)
Uni-Tea: Towards a unified, parameterizable model of distributed "object"
http://www.erights.org/talks/uni-tea/index.html (Powerpoint 2002 or later)
Administration of this Web Page
Mailing lists and discussion forums
may be found under the croquet link above.
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