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Design and semantics of quantum: a language to control resource consumption in distributed computing

Design and semantics of quantum: a language to control resource consumption in distributed computing
Design and semantics of quantum: a language to control resource consumption in distributed computing
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.
183
Moreau, Luc
033c63dd-3fe9-4040-849f-dfccbe0406f8
Queinnec, Christian
ad5f7014-b1a1-4538-b403-45476fb26627
Moreau, Luc
033c63dd-3fe9-4040-849f-dfccbe0406f8
Queinnec, Christian
ad5f7014-b1a1-4538-b403-45476fb26627

Moreau, Luc and Queinnec, Christian (1997) Design and semantics of quantum: a language to control resource consumption in distributed computing. Usenix Conference on Domain-Specific Languages (DSL'97). p. 183 .

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Other)

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.

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dsl97 - Accepted Manuscript
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More information

Published date: 1997
Additional Information: Address: Santa-Barbara, California
Venue - Dates: Usenix Conference on Domain-Specific Languages (DSL'97), 1997-01-01
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 252760
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/252760
PURE UUID: 854dcea5-7fa3-4f53-b251-50e94012f7c6
ORCID for Luc Moreau: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-3494-120X

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Date deposited: 20 Mar 2000
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 05:22

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Contributors

Author: Luc Moreau ORCID iD
Author: Christian Queinnec

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