overview:-

Extending the classical occam language with ideas of mobility and dynamic network reconfiguration, ideas from Milner’s p-calculus [6]

• we have found ways of implementing these extensions that involve significantly less resource overhead than imposed by the higher-level — but less structured, information and non-compositional — concurrency primitives of existing languages (such as Java) or libraries (such as POSIX threads)

As a result, we can run applications with the order of millions of concurrent processes on modestly powered PCs

• we have plans to extend the system, without sacrifice of too much efficiency and none of logic, to simple clusters of workstations, wider networks such as the Grid and small embedded devices

In the interests of proveability, we have been careful to preserve the distinction between the original point-to-point synchronised communication of occam and the dynamic asynchronous multiplexed communication of the p-calculus; in this, we have been prepared to sacrifice the elegant sparsity of the p-calculus

• we conjecture that the extra complexity and discipline introduced will make the task of developing, proving and maintaining concurrent and distributed programs easier