Towards S+Net: compositional extra-functional specification for large systems. Poss, R., Verstraaten, M., & Shafarenko, A. In (rejected)
Towards S+Net: compositional extra-functional specification for large systems [pdf]Local  abstract   bibtex   
System coordination is recently facing new challenges: at the application level, the Cloud and Big Data era has pushed functional specifications to a new level of complexity, where responsibility is spread across multiple independent organizations. At the platform level, parallelism at multiple scales, heterogeneous performance and functional units, thermal and energy budgets and more frequent faults have also brought global-scale deployment and scheduling to a new level of complexity beyond the understanding of the most seasoned system experts. In this article, we propose to equip compositional specification, such as traditionally advertised in functional languages, with extra-functional semantics appropriate for coordination, as a promising approach to harness the staggering complexity of large systems. This approach establishes a bridge between the functional programming and systems community: from the functional world, using the power of compositional semantics for inductive reasoning and programming, and from the systems world, resource awareness and in particular budget constraints. We apply our approach to the coordination language S-Net, yielding its next incarnation, S+Net. Its extra-functional combinators include feedback loops from the execution environment, composable granularity parameterization, composable energy, latency, throughput and storage budgets constraints, composable isolation specifications, and composable scoping of activities and state onto hardware resources. We also illustrate their impact on relevant industrial applications.

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