Is Network a Computer? Writing Programs that run over the Internet.
|
|
The widespread deployment of networked applications and adoption of the internet has fostered an environment in which many distributed services are available. The next generation internet will increase this trend. There is great demand to automate business processes and workflows across organizations and individuals. Such solutions require orchestration of concurrent and distributed services in the face of arbitrary delays and failures of components and communication. Practical solutions to such problems, based on commonly-used programming languages, rely on threads for concurrency and semaphores for synchronization. Exception mechanisms are frequently used to handle failure. Building reliable concurrent system using these primitives is difficult and error prone. We propose a novel approach, called Orc for orchestration, that supports a structured model of concurrent programming. This model assumes that basic services, like sequential computation and data manipulation, are implemented by primitive sites. Orc provides constructs to orchestrate the concurrent invocation of sites to achieve a goal -- while managing time-outs, priorities, and failure of sites or communication. It has applications in workflow, business process management, and web service orchestration. In this talk, we give a tutorial introduction to Orc. Despite the simplicity of the language, Orc is able to express a large variety of useful orchestration tasks. |
|
MetroCon 2007 |
|
“Innovating for Society” |
|
Emerging Technologies |
|
Jayadev Misra is a professor and holder of the Schlumberger Centennial chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been the past editor of several journals including: Computing Surveys, Journal of the ACM, Information Processing Letters and the Formal Aspects of Computing. He is the author of two books, Parallel Program Design: A Foundation, Addison-Wesley, 1988, (with Mani Chandy), and A Discipline of Multiprogramming, Springer-Verlag, 2001. Misra is a fellow of ACM and IEEE; he held the Guggenheim fellowship during 1988-1989. He was the Strachey lecturer at Oxford University in 1996, and the holder of the Belgian FNRS International Chair of Computer Science in 1990. Misra's research interests are in the area of concurrent programming, with emphasis on rigorous methods to improve the programming process. He is currently spear-heading an effort, jointly with Tony Hoare, to establish a grand challenge project to automate large-scale program verification. |
|
About the Speaker: |
