| Speaker Affiliation | NICTA, Sydney, Australien |
| Start | 09.04.2015, 10:00 Uhr |
| Location | TU Braunschweig, Informatikzentrum, Mühlenpfordtstraße 23, 1. OG, Hörsaal M 160 |
| Invited by | Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ina Schaefer |
| Fair Schedulers cannot be implemented in CCS-like languages even under progress and certain fairness assumptions. In the process algebra community it is sometimes suggested that, on some level of abstraction, any distributed system can be modelled in standard process-algebraic specification formalisms like CCS. This sentiment is strengthened by results testifying that CCS, like many similar formalisms, is Turing powerful and provides a mechanism for interaction. This talk counters that sentiment by presenting a simple fair scheduler---one that in suitable variations occurs in many distributed systems---of which no implementation can be expressed in CCS, unless CCS is enriched with a fairness assumption. The same could be said for COSY, CSP, ACP, LOTOS, mCRL, the pi-calculus, etc. A cornerstone in the proof is that the fair scheduler cannot be implemented in terms of Petri nets. Since Dekker's and Peterson's mutual exclusion protocols implement fair schedulers, it follows that these protocols cannot be rendered correctly in CCS without imposing a fairness assumption. Peterson expressed this algorithm correctly in pseudocode without resorting to a fairness assumption, so it furthermore follows that CCS lacks the expressive power to accurately capture such pseudocode. | |