PhD Course on Models of Distributed Systems

Post date: 16-Mar-2011 15:48:47

Upcoming PhD course

Models of Distributed Systems: CCS and pi-calculus.

March-April 2011

Aula F, Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica - Via Ospedale 72, Cagliari

Prof. Gabriel Ciobanu

Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi

Objectives:

The student will learn how to use calculi for communicating processes and name-passing process calculi which are suitable for mobile systems in order to formally describe and reason about distributed systems. Both CCS and pi-calculus have the advantage of automated tools for checking bisimilarity and various properties.

Contents:

Communicating Systems (CCS) + CWB tool

Mobile Systems (pi-calculus) + MWB tool

Short description:

The explosive growth of the World Wide Web leads to new programming languages for "global computation" and mobility. In order to be able to reason on the global computation, we need to understand some formalisms behind these languages. We start with a process algebra called CCS, and then focus on the pi-calculus. Process calculi are formalisms for the description and analysis of distributed systems. The pi-calculus is emerging as one of the most influential of such calculi. The pi-calculus naturally models systems with a changing structure. Topics that will be surveyed include: algebraic theory; behavioural equivalences and preorders; reasoning techniques; applications. No special prerequisites are expected, but some familiarity with the lambda-calculus and process algebras are welcome.

Reading material:

  • R.Milner. Communication and Concurrency, Prentice Hall, 2nd ed., 1994.
  • R.Milner. Communicating and Mobile Systems: the pi-calculus, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  • R.Milner, J.Parrow, D.Walker. A Calculus of Mobile Processes (I+II), Information and Computation, 100 (1):1-77, 1992.

The official presentation of the course will be on next Tuesday (March 22), in Aula F, at 16:30. The schedule of the course will be fixed during this meeting.

The course has been funded by the Autonomous Region of Sardinia through the Visiting Professor Program 2010.