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Protocol combinators for modeling, testing, and execution of distributed systems

Part of: PADL 2019 Conference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2021

KRISTOFFER JUST ARNDAL ANDERSEN Open the ORCID record for KRISTOFFER JUST ARNDAL ANDERSEN [Opens in a new window]  and
ILYA SERGEY
KRISTOFFER JUST ARNDAL ANDERSEN
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark (e-mail: kristoffer@arndalandersen.dk)
ILYA SERGEY
Affiliation:
NUS School of Computing, Yale-NUS College and National University of Singapore, Singapore (e-mail: ilya.sergey@yale-nus.edu.sg)
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Abstract

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Distributed systems are hard to get right, model, test, debug, and teach. Their textbook definitions, typically given in a form of replicated state machines, are concise, yet prone to introducing programming errors if naïvely translated into runnable implementations.

In this work, we present Distributed Protocol Combinators (DPC), a declarative programming framework that aims to bridge the gap between specifications and runnable implementations of distributed systems, and facilitate their modeling, testing, and execution. DPC builds on the ideas from the state-of-the art logics for compositional systems verification. The contribution of DPC is a novel family of program-level primitives, which facilitates construction of larger distributed systems from smaller components, streamlining the usage of the most common asynchronous message-passing communication patterns, and providing machinery for testing and user-friendly dynamic verification of systems. This paper describes the main ideas behind the design of the framework and presents its implementation in Haskell. We introduce DPC through a series of characteristic examples and showcase it on a number of distributed protocols from the literature.

This paper extends our preceeding conference publication (Andersen & Sergey, 2019a) with an exploration of randomized testing for protocols and their implementations, and an additional case study demonstrating bounded model checking of protocols.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Functional Programming , Volume 31 , 2021 , e3
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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