Abstractions, semantic models and analysis tools for concurrent systems: Progress and open problems

Abstract

The growth of mobile and cloud computing, cyberphysical systems and the internet of things has arguably made scalable concurrency the central to computing. Actor languages and frameworks have been widely adopted to address scalability. Moreover, new tools that combine static and dyamic analysis are making software safer. This presentation describes the actor programming model and reasoning tools for scalable concurrency. As we scale up cyberphysical applications and build the internet of things, a key limitation of current languages and tools becomes apparent: the difficulty of representing quantitative and probabilistic properties and reasoning about them. The paper concludes by discussing some techniques to address reasoning about the behavior of complex scalable concurrent applications.