Abstract

The development of distributed applications has not progressed as rapidly as its enabling technologies. In part, this is due to the difficulty of reasoning about such complex systems. In contrast to sequential systems, parallel systems give rise to parallel events, and the resulting uncertainty of the observed order of these events. Loosely coupled distributed systems complicate this even further by introducing the element of multiple imperfect observers of these parallel events. The goal of this dissertation is to advance parallel and distributed systems development by producing a parameterized model that can be instantiated to reflect the computation and coordination properties of such systems. The result is a model called paraDOS that we show to be general enough to have instantiations of two very distinct distributed computation models, Actors and tuple space. We show how paraDOS allows us to use operational semantics to reason about computation when such reasoning must account for multiple, inconsistent and imperfect views. We then extend the paraDOS model with an abstraction to support composition of communicating computational systems. This extension gives us a tool to reason formally about heterogeneous systems, and about new distributed computing paradigms such as the multiple tuple spaces support seen in Sun's JavaSpaces and IBM's T Spaces.

Graduation Date

2000

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Parsons, Rebecca; Hughes, Charles E.

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Engineering

Department

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Degree Program

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Format

PDF

Language

English

Rights

Written permission granted by copyright holder to the University of Central Florida Libraries to digitize and distribute for nonprofit, educational purposes.

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Identifier

DP0000189

Accessibility Status

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