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Causing communication closure: safe program composition with reliable non-FIFO channels

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Abstract

A rigorous framework for analyzing safe composition of distributed programs is presented. It facilitates specifying notions of safe sequential execution of distributed programs in various models of communication. A notion of sealing is defined, where if a program P is immediately followed by a program Q that seals P then P will be —it will execute as if it runs in isolation. None of its send or receive actions will match or interact with actions outside P. The applicability of sealing is illustrated by a study of program composition when communication is reliable but not necessarily FIFO. In this model, special care must be taken to ensure that messages do not accidentally overtake one another in the composed program. In this model no program that sends or receives messages can be composed automatically with arbitrary programs without jeopardizing their intended behavior. Safety of composition becomes context-sensitive and new tools are needed for ensuring it. The investigation of sealing in this model reveals a novel connection between Lamport causality and safe composition. A characterization of sealable programs is given, as well as efficient algorithms for testing if Q seals P and for constructing a seal for a class of straight-line programs. It is shown that every sealable program can be sealed using O(n) messages. In fact, 3n − 4 messages are necessary and sufficient in the worst case, despite the fact that a sealable program may be open to interference on Ω(n 2) channels.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia

    Kai Engelhardt

  2. National ICT Australia Limited, The University of New South Wales, Locked Bag 6016, Sydney, NSW, 1466, Australia

    Kai Engelhardt

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion, 32000, Haifa, Israel

    Yoram Moses

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  1. Kai Engelhardt
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  2. Yoram Moses
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Correspondence to Kai Engelhardt.

Additional information

A preliminary version appeared as [6]. Work was partially supported by ARC Discovery Grant RM02036.

NICTA is funded by the Australian Government as represented by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and the Australian Research Council through the ICT Centre of Excellence program.

Work on this paper happened during a sabbatical visit by the second author to the School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.

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Engelhardt, K., Moses, Y. Causing communication closure: safe program composition with reliable non-FIFO channels. Distrib. Comput. 22, 73–91 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-009-0081-9

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