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Synchrony versus causality in distributed systems†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2014

KIRSTIN PETERS ,
JENS-WOLFHARD SCHICKE-UFFMANN ,
URSULA GOLTZ  and
UWE NESTMANN
KIRSTIN PETERS
Affiliation:
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, TU Berlin, Germany Emails: kirstin.peters@tu-berlin.de, uwe.nestmann@tu-berlin.de
JENS-WOLFHARD SCHICKE-UFFMANN
Affiliation:
Institute for Programming and Reactive Systems, TU Braunschweig, Germany
URSULA GOLTZ
Affiliation:
Institute for Programming and Reactive Systems, TU Braunschweig, Germany
UWE NESTMANN
Affiliation:
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, TU Berlin, Germany Emails: kirstin.peters@tu-berlin.de, uwe.nestmann@tu-berlin.de
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Abstract

Given a synchronous system, we study the question whether – or, under which conditions – the behaviour of that system can be realized by a (non-trivially) distributed and hence asynchronous implementation. In this paper, we partially answer this question by examining the role of causality for the implementation of synchrony in two fundamental different formalisms of concurrency, Petri nets and the π-calculus. For both formalisms it turns out that each ‘good’ encoding of synchronous interactions using just asynchronous interactions introduces causal dependencies in the translation.

Information

Type
Paper
Information
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science , Volume 26 , Special Issue 8: Special Issue: Express'11 , December 2016 , pp. 1459 - 1498
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

†

This work was supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation), grants NE-1505/2-1 and GO-671/6-1.

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