Open Systems Laboratory at Illinois

Research Theme

The goal of the Illinois Open Systems Laboratory is to develop mechanisms to simplify the development of scalable parallel, distributed and mobile computing systems. Such systems are open to interactions with their environment, must satisfy real-time constraints, and often affect physical processes. The approach of the laboratory is multidisciplinary—is conducted in foundational models of concurrency, programming languages, and middleware.

Research in the laboratory is based on the actor model of concurrent computation. Actors are inherently autonomous computational objects which interact with each other by sending messages. Each actor has a unique name the activity of different actors is potentially parallel. Actor systems are highly dynamic: new actors may be created and names of actors exchanged. The model is very general: processes, sensors and actuators can be modelled as actors.

Over the last decade, research in the group has developed a meta-architectural model for middleware. The model has been formalized and applied to dependable computing and software architecture. Programming abstractions have been developed to represent coordination constraints real-time and requirements. The Actor model has been extended to explicitly model mobility and bounded resources, thus providing a powerful formalism for mobile agents.

Latest Publications

  1. Peter Dinges, Minas Charalambides, and Gul Agha. Automated inference of atomic sets for safe concurrent execution. Technical Report, University of Illinois at Urbana--Champaign, April 2013.
  2. Samira Tasharofi, Peter Dinges, and Ralph Johnson. Why do scala developers mix the actor model with other concurrency models?. In ECOOP'13 - Object-Oriented Programming, 27th European Conference, Montpellier, France, July 1--6, 2013. 2013. Accepted for publication.
  3. Peter Dinges, Minas Charalambides, and Gul Agha. Automated inference of atomic sets for safe concurrent execution. In Stephen Freund and Corina S. Păsăreanu, editors, PASTE 2013 - 11th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering, colocated with PLDI 2013, Seattle, WA, USA, June 20, 2013. 2013. Accepted for publication.
  4. Ashish Vulimiri, Gul A. Agha, Philip Brighten Godfrey, and Karthik Lakshminarayanan. How well can congestion pricing neutralize denial of service attacks?. In SIGMETRICS, 137–150. ACM, 2012.
  5. Samira Tasharofi, Rajesh K. Karmani, Steven Lauterburg, Axel Legay, Darko Marinov, and Gul Agha. TransDPOR: a novel dynamic partial-order reduction technique for testing actor programs. In FMOODS/FORTE, volume 7273 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 219–234. Springer, 2012.

See the list of all publications for more.