S+Net: extending functional coordination with extra-functional semantics

TL;DR

S+Net is a coordination language for streaming networks that integrates extra-functional semantics, enabling better control over resource usage, performance, and fault handling while maintaining simplicity and compatibility with existing languages.

Contribution

S+Net extends S-Net by orthogonally integrating extra-functional semantics, facilitating incremental adoption of resource and performance control in streaming applications.

Findings

Defines a compositional coordination language with orthogonal semantics.

Enables reasoning about resource usage, performance, and fault handling.

Serves as a transitional step towards AstraKahn.

Abstract

This technical report introduces S+Net, a compositional coordination language for streaming networks with extra-functional semantics. Compositionality simplifies the specification of complex parallel and distributed applications; extra-functional semantics allow the application designer to reason about and control resource usage, performance and fault handling. The key feature of S+Net is that functional and extra-functional semantics are defined orthogonally from each other. S+Net can be seen as a simultaneous simplification and extension of the existing coordination language S-Net, that gives control of extra-functional behavior to the S-Net programmer. S+Net can also be seen as a transitional research step between S-Net and AstraKahn, another coordination language currently being designed at the University of Hertfordshire. In contrast with AstraKahn which constitutes a re-design from the ground up, S+Net preserves the basic operational semantics of S-Net and thus provides an incremental introduction of extra-functional control in an existing language.