Toward safe and efficient reconfiguration with Concerto

• Published in: Science of computer programming Vol. 203; pp. 102582 - 31
• Main Authors: Chardet, Maverick, Coullon, Hélène, Robillard, Simon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.03.2021; Elsevier
• Subjects: Component-based models; Computer Science; Coordination; Distributed software; Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing; Modeling and Simulation; Parallelism; Programming Languages; Reconfiguration; Software Engineering; Component-based models; Parallelism; Distributed software; Coordination; Reconfiguration; component-based models; reconfiguration; distributed software; parallelism; coordination
• ISSN: 0167-6423; 1872-7964
• DOI: 10.1016/j.scico.2020.102582

•A formal reconfiguration model.•Automatic coordination of software components lifecycle.•Higher expressiveness of parallelism within reconfigurations.•A predictable execution model to assess the performance of reconfigurations.•A theoretical and experimental evaluation. For large-scale distributed systems that need to adapt to a changing environment, conducting a reconfiguration is a challenging task. In particular, efficient reconfigurations require the coordination of multiple tasks with complex dependencies. We present Concerto, a model used to manage the lifecycle of software components and coordinate their reconfiguration operations. Concerto promotes efficiency with a fine-grained representation of dependencies and parallel execution of reconfiguration actions, both within components and between them. In this paper, the elements of the model are described as well as their formal semantics. In addition, we outline a performance model that can be used to estimate the time required by reconfigurations, and we describe an implementation of the model. The evaluation demonstrates the accuracy of the performance estimations, and illustrates the performance gains provided by the execution model of Concerto compared to state-of-the-art systems.