Book Description

The awareness of the ideas characterized by Communicating Processes Architecture and their adoption by industry beyond their traditional base in safety-critical systems and security is growing. The complexity of modern computing systems has become so great that no one person – maybe not even a small team – can understand all aspects and all interactions. The only hope of making such systems work is to ensure that all components are correct by design and that the components can be combined to achieve scalability. A crucial property is that the cost of making a change to a system depends linearly on the size of that change – not on the size of the system being changed. Of course, this must be true whether that change is a matter of maintenance (e.g. to take advantage of upcoming multiprocessor hardware) or the addition of new functionality. One key is that system composition (and disassembly) introduces no surprises. A component must behave consistently, no matter the context in which it is used – which means that component interfaces must be explicit, published and free from hidden side-effect. This publication offers strongly refereed high-quality papers covering many differing aspects: system design and implementation (for both hardware and software), tools (concurrent programming languages, libraries and run-time kernels), formal methods and applications.