On Futures for Streaming Data in ABS

Abstract

Abstract. Many modern distributed software applications require a continuous interaction between their components exploiting streaming data from the server to the client. The Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) language has been developed for the modeling and analysis of distributed systems. In ABS, concurrent objects communicate by calling each other's methods asynchronously. Return values are communicated asynchronously too via the return statement and so-called futures. In this paper, we extend the basic ABS model of asynchronous method invocation and return in order to support the streaming of data. We introduce the notion of a "Future-based Data Stream" to extend the ABS. The application of this notion and its impact on performance are illustrated by means of a case study in the domain of social networks simulation.

Distributed futures for efficient data transfer between parallel processes

“…Several works focus on the efficient use of futures in concurrent and distributed settings [2,7,12], sometimes synchronizing a group of tasks, but none of them use a single future as the abstraction of a large set of data. In the domain of parallel and distributed computing, such an abstraction is generally provided by distributed arrays.…”

“…The notion of streaming futures was defined in the context of ABS in [2]. This approach provides a solution for tailoring futures to large amounts of data and in particular data streams.…”

A formal actor-based model for streaming the future

“…A preliminary discussion of the overall idea underlying this paper is given in [6]. As an extension, in this paper we introduce the different implementations of data streams, an operational semantics for both implementations of streams, a new type system which formalizes the integration of futures and data streams, and a proof of type-safety.…”