View-Centric Reasoning About Space-Based Middleware

Distributed computing systems, including those that utilize space-based middleware, present significant challenges when attempting to reason formally about their behaviors and properties. In particular, two or more computational events may occur in parallel. We introduce View-Centric Reasoning (VCR)---a set of abstractions that comprises a general framework for reasoning about parallel and distributed computation. First we extend the CSP metaphor to support traces of parallel events, rather than the traditional random interleaving of individual events. Next we introduce the concept of views to represent explicitly the multiple possible perspectives of the same parallel computation. Finally, we consider an instance of VCR for reasoning about Gelernter's Linda language and tuple space computation, the basis for much of today's space-based middleware