Year 1997

Luc Moreau and Christian Queinnec. On the finiteness of resources in distributed computing. Research Report 3147, INRIA, April 1997.

Abstract:

Millions of computers are now connected together by the Internet. At a fast pace, applications are taking profit of these new capabilities, and become parallel and distributed, e.g. applets on the WWW or agent technology. As we live in a world with finite resources, an important challenge is to be able to control computations in such an environment. For instance, a user might like to suspend a computation because another one seems to be more promising. In this paper, we present a paradigm that allows the programmer to monitor and control computations, whether parallel or distributed, by mastering their resource consumption.

[See also]

Christian Queinnec. Sérialisation-désérialisation en DMeroon . In Omar Rafiq, editor, NOTERE97 -- Colloque international sur les NOuvelles TEchnologies de la RÉpartition, pages 333-346, Pau (France), November 1997. Éditions TASC.

Abstract:

La transmission de valeurs entre mémoires séparées passe par une sérialisation qui les transforme en un train d'octets puis par une désérialisation qui retransforme ces octets en valeurs équivalentes. Ces deux procédés sont généralement conçus, écrits et maintenus de concert: toute amélioration nécessite de les faire évoluer tous deux. Nous proposons ici de considérer la sérialisation comme une compilation transformant une valeur en un programme délivré, pour évaluation, à un interprète de désérialisation. Le protocole est alors défini comme le langage d'échange. La richesse de ce dernier fonde la souplesse de ce premier puisqu'une large gamme de compilations est possible selon les particularités des valeurs à transmettre. Nous relatons cette expérience dans le cadre du système de mémoire partagée répartie DMeroon .

[See also]

Christian Queinnec. Le langage de commande gibiane, description informelle, revision 1.23. Contrat CEA/SAV 24025/SAV, Rapport LIP6/SPI/019, LIP6, June 1997.

Abstract:

Gibiane est un langage inventé et utilisé depuis une quinzaine d'années par le Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA). Gibiane permet la mise en oeuvre de bibliothèques de codes écrits en Fortran, C, etc. Les points d'entrée de ces bibliothèques sont considérés comme des opérateurs dont l'enchainement est assuré, interactivement ou pas, par Gibiane . Ce rapport technique (correspondant à la première étape du contrat CEA/SAV 24025/CH) décrit ce langage de commande.

[See also]

Luc Moreau and Christian Queinnec. Design and semantics of Quantum: a language to control resource consumption in distributed computing. In Usenix Conference on Domain Specific Language, DSL'97, pages 183-197, Santa-Barbara (California, USA), October 1997.

Abstract:

This paper describes the semantics of Quantum , a language that was specifically designed to control resource consumption of distributed computations, such as mobile agent style applications. In Quantum , computations can be driven by mastering their resource consumption. Resources can be understood as processors cycles, geographical expansion, bandwidth or duration of communications, etc. We adopt a generic view by saying that computations need energy to be performed. Quantum relies on three new primitives that deal with energy. The first primitive creates a tank of energy associated with a computation. Asynchronous notifications inform the user of energy exhaustion and computation termination. The other two primitives allow us to implement suspension and resumption of computations by emptying a tank and by supplying more energy to a tank. The semantics takes the form of an abstract machine with explicit parallelism and energy-related primitives.

[See also]

Christian Queinnec. Distributed generic functions. In Jean-Paul Bahsoun, Takanobu Baba, and Jean-Pierre Briot, editors, Second France-Japan workshop on Object-Based Parallel and Distributed Computing -- OBPDC '97, Toulouse (France), October 1997.

Abstract:

The network now gives the opportunity to combine code and data from everywhere in the world. However, the dominant paradigm is the client/server model where immotile objects with static interfaces can only be used as prescribed on their proprietary site. While this constraint corresponds to understandable industrial programming practices, it negates the point of view of dynamic clients that collect interesting objects and want to confer new behaviors to these collected objects. To enrich objects ``from the outside'' that is, without access to their source code thus without recompilation, is the problem addressed in this paper.