A bulk-synchronous parallel process algebra

The calculus of communicating systems (CCS) process algebra is a well-known formal model of synchronization and communication. It is used for the analysis of safety and liveness in protocols or distributed programs. In more recent work, it is used for the analysis of security properties. Bulk-synchronous parallelism (BSP) is an algorithm and programming model of data-parallel computation. It is useful for the design, analysis and programming of scalable parallel algorithms. Many current evolutions require the integration of distributed and parallel programming: grid systems for sharing resources across the Internet, secure and reliable global access to parallel computer systems, geographic distribution of confidential data on randomly accessible systems, etc. Such software services must provide guarantees of safety, liveness, security together with scalable and reliable performance. Formal models are therefore needed to combine parallel performance and concurrent behavior. With this goal in mind, we propose here an integration of BSP with CCS semantics, generalize its cost (performance) model and sketch its application to scheduling problems in meta-computing.