UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
		 COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM


                    "Towards Mobility Skeletons"
 

                          Dr. Phil Trinder  
                      (Dependable Systems Group,
                      Herriot-Watt Univesity, UK)

        	        24 May 2006 (Wednesday) 

                          Lecture Theatre E350
		       Hatfield, College Lane Campus
			       3 - 4 pm

       	       Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available.

		    Everyone is Welcome to Attend



Abstract:

In mobile languages programmers control the placement of code or
computations in open networks, e.g. a program can migrate between
locations.  Mobile computations are typically stateful and interact
with the state at each location in the network.  We propose mobility
skeletons, higher-order polymorphic functions that encapsulate common
patterns of mobile computation.  Mobility skeletons are analogous to,
but very different from, algorithmic skeletons - higher-order
polymorphic functions encapsulating common patterns of parallel
computation.

We have identified three common patterns of mobile computation,
and implemented them as a library of higher-order functions in
mobile Haskell.  Each mobility skeleton is defined and
illustrated with an example. We show how mobility skeletons can be
composed and nested, and illustrate their use in a non-trivial case
study: a distributed meeting planner. Mobility skeletons are extensible:
there is a small set of mobility primitives, and medium-level
abstractions such as remote evaluation can be defined using them. New
mobility skeletons can be defined using the medium and low level
abstractions.




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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq