Asynchronous Pi-calculus Research Articles

Name-passing calculi: From fusions to preorders and types

The fusion calculi are a simplification of the pi-calculus in which input and output are symmetric and restriction is the only binder. We highlight a major difference between these calculi and the pi-calculus from the point of view of types, proving some impossibility results for subtyping in fusion calculi. We propose a modification of fusion calculi in which the name equivalences produced by fusions are replaced by name preorders, and with a distinction between positive and negative occurrences of names. The resulting calculus allows us to import subtype systems, and related results, from the pi-calculus. We examine the consequences of the modification on behavioural equivalence (e.g., context-free characterisations of barbed congruence) and expressiveness (e.g., full abstraction of the embedding of the asynchronous pi-calculus).

Encoding CSP into CCS

We study encodings from CSP into asynchronous CCS with name passing and matching, so in fact, the asynchronous pi-calculus. By doing so, we discuss two different ways to map the multi-way synchronisation mechanism of CSP into the two-way synchronisation mechanism of CCS. Both encodings satisfy the criteria of Gorla except for compositionality, as both use an additional top-level context. Following the work of Parrow and Sj\"odin, the first encoding uses a centralised coordinator and establishes a variant of weak bisimilarity between source terms and their translations. The second encoding is decentralised, and thus more efficient, but ensures only a form of coupled similarity between source terms and their translations.

Symbolic and Asynchronous Semantics via Normalized Coalgebras

The operational semantics of interactive systems is usually described by labeled transition systems. Abstract semantics (that is defined in terms of bisimilarity) is characterized by the final morphism in some category of coalgebras. Since the behaviour of interactive systems is for many reasons infinite, symbolic semantics were introduced as a mean to define smaller, possibly finite, transition systems, by employing symbolic actions and avoiding some sources of infiniteness. Unfortunately, symbolic bisimilarity has a different shape with respect to ordinary bisimilarity, and thus the standard coalgebraic characterization does not work. In this paper, we introduce its coalgebraic models. We will use as motivating examples two asynchronous formalisms: open Petri nets and asynchronous pi-calculus. Indeed, as we have shown in a previous paper, asynchronous bisimilarity can be seen as an instance of symbolic bisimilarity.

Specifying Properties of Concurrent Computations in CLF

CLF (the Concurrent Logical Framework) is a language for specifying and reasoning about concurrent systems. Its most significant feature is the first-class representation of concurrent executions as monadic expressions. We illustrate the representation techniques available within CLF by applying them to an asynchronous pi-calculus with correspondence assertions, including its dynamic semantics, safety criterion, and a type system with latent effects due to Gordon and Jeffrey.

Linearity, Persistence and Testing Semantics in the Asynchronous Pi-Calculus

In [C. Palamidessi, V. Saraswat, F. Valencia and B. Victor. On the Expressiveness of Linearity vs Persistence in the Asynchronous Pi Calculus. LICS 2006:59-68, 2006] the authors studied the expressiveness of persistence in the asynchronous @p-calculus ([email protected]) wrt weak barbed congruence. The study is incomplete because it ignores the issue of divergence. In this paper, we present an expressiveness study of persistence in the asynchronous @p-calculus ([email protected]) wrt De Nicola and Hennessy's testing scenario which is sensitive to divergence. Following [C. Palamidessi, V. Saraswat, F. Valencia and B. Victor. On the Expressiveness of Linearity vs Persistence in the Asynchronous Pi Calculus. LICS 2006:59-68, 2006], we consider [email protected] and three sub-languages of it, each capturing one source of persistence: the persistent-input calculus ([email protected]), the persistent-output calculus ([email protected]) and persistent calculus ([email protected]). In [C. Palamidessi, V. Saraswat, F. Valencia and B. Victor. On the Expressiveness of Linearity vs Persistence in the Asynchronous Pi Calculus. LICS 2006:59-68, 2006] the authors showed encodings from [email protected] into the semi-persistent calculi (i.e., [email protected] and [email protected]) correct wrt weak barbed congruence. In this paper we prove that, under some general conditions, there cannot be an encoding from [email protected] into a (semi)-persistent calculus preserving the must testing semantics.

Matching Systems for Concurrent Calculi

Matching systems were introduced by Carbone and Maffeis, and used to investigate the expressiveness of the pi-calculus with polyadic synchronisation. We adapt their definition and investigate matching systems for CCS, the pi-calculus and Mobile Ambients. We show among other results that the asynchronous pi-calculus with matching cannot be encoded (under certain conditions) in CCS with polyadic synchronisation of all finite levels.

Linear forwarders

A linear forwarder is a process that receives one message on a channel and sends it on a different channel. We use linear forwarders to provide a distributed implementation of Milner’s asynchronous pi calculus. Such a distributed implementation is known to be difficult due to input capability, where a received name is used as the subject of a subsequent input. This allows the dynamic creation of large input processes in the wrong place, thus requiring comparatively large code migrations in order to avoid consensus problems. Linear forwarders constitute a small atom of input capability that is easy to move. We show that the full input capability can be simply encoded using linear forwarders. We also design a distributed machine, demonstrating the ease with which we can implement the pi calculus using linear forwarders. We also show that linear forwarders allow for a simple encoding of distributed choice and have “clean” behaviour in the presence of failures.

Comparing the expressive power of the synchronous and asynchronous $pi$ -calculi

The Asynchronous pi-calculus, proposed by Honda and Tokoro (1991) and, independently, by Boudol (1992), is a subset of the pi-calculus (Milner, 1992) which contains no explicit operators for choice and output-prefixing. The communication mechanism of this calculus, however, is powerful enough to simulate output-prefixing, as shown by Honda and Tokoro (1991) and by Boudol (1992), and input-guarded choice, as shown by Nestmann and Pierce (2000). A natural question arises, then, whether or not it is as expressive as the full pi-calculus. We show that this is not the case. More precisely, we show that there does not exist any uniform, fully distributed translation from the pi-calculus into the asynchronous pi-calculus, up to any "reasonable" notion of equivalence. This result is based on the incapability of the asynchronous pi-calculus to break certain symmetries possibly present in the initial communication graph. By similar arguments, we prove a separation result between the pi-calculus and CCS, and between the pi-calculus and the pi-calculus with internal mobility, a subset of the pi-calculus proposed by Sangiorgi where the output actions can only transmit private names.

Information flow vs. resource access in the asynchronous pi-calculus

We propose an extension of the asynchronous π-calculus in which a variety of security properties may be captured using types. These are an extension of the input/output types for the π-calculus in which I/O capabilities are assigned specific security levels. The main innovation is a uniform typing system that, by varying slightly the allowed set of types, captures different notions of security.We first define a typing system that ensures that processes running at security level σ cannot access resources with a security level higher than σ. The notion of access control guaranteed by this system is formalized in terms of a Type Safety Theorem.We then show that, by restricting the allowed types, our system prohibits implicit information flow from high-level to low-level processes. We prove that low-level behavior can not be influenced by changes to high-level behavior. This is formalized as a noninterference theorem with respect to may testing.

Abstractions for Fault-Tolerant Global Computing: Extended Abstract

Global computing (WAN programming, Internet programming) distinguishes itself from local computing (LAN computing) by among other things the fact that it exposes the network to the application, rather than seeking to hide it with network transparency as in LAN programming. Global computing languages seek to provide useful abstractions for building applications in such environments. This paper introduces the pik-calculus, a calculus for asynchronous distributed programming that incorporates abstractions for building fault-tolerant global applications. The calculus incorporates notions of atomic failure and failure dependencies, from which various forms of distributed transactions and optimistic computation may be built. The pik-calculus extends the asynchronous pi-calculus with a notion of logs and “safe” operations for modifying those logs.

Decoding Choice Encodings

We study two encodings of the asynchronous pi-calculus with input-guarded choice into its choice-free fragment. One encoding is divergence-free, but refines the atomic commitment of choice into gradual commitment. The other preserves atomicity, but introduces divergence. The divergent encoding is fully abstract with respect to weak bisimulation, but the more natural divergence-free encoding is not. Instead, we show that it is fully abstract with respect to coupled simulation, a slightly coarser - but still coinductively defined - equivalence that does not enforce bisimilarity of internal branching decisions. The correctness proofs for the two choice encodings introduce a novel proof technique exploiting the properties of explicit decodings from translations to source terms.

Objects as Mobile Processes

The object calculus of Abadi and Cardelli [AC96, AC94b, AC94a]<br />is intended as model of central aspects of object-oriented programming languages. In this paper we encode the object calculus in the asynchronous pi-calculus without matching and investigate the properties of our encoding.