A simulator for the IOA language

With current advances in networking, distributed computing is becoming more commonplace. Distributed systems are hard to design and reason about, because distributed actions can exhibit arbitrary interleaving. In order to make it easier to design and analyze distributed systems, Nancy Lynch and her students have developed a formal mathematical model, the input/output (I/O) automaton model, for describing asynchronous concurrent systems. Based on the I/O automaton model, a new programming language, the IOA language, together with a suite of tools for testing, verifying, and analyzing distributed algorithms is being developed at MIT. The topic of this thesis is a simulator for the IOA language. Simulation allows one to test and debug algorithms, and it can provide insight that is helpful in understanding algorithms and in constructing correctness proofs for them. The simulator can be used to study the performance of an algorithm under varying conditions. Other contributions of this thesis are the design of an intermediate language that can be used by other IOA tools and the development of a tool that transforms an IOA program into the intermediate representation.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

1998

Author dc:creator

• Chefter, Anna E., 1973-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stephen J. Garland and Nancy A. Lynch.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47904

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/47904