Report Number: CSL-TR-97-725
Institution: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
Title: Designing reliable programs with RAPIDE
Author: Madhav, Neel
Author: Luckham, David C.
Date: april 1997
Abstract: Rapide is a language for prototyping large, distributed systems. Rapide allows the scale design of a system to be constructed and analyzed before resources are applied to the construction of the actual system. Two important facets of designing reliable systems are (1) system architecture -- the components in the system and the communication paths between the componnts, and (2) system behavior -- the requirements on the components and the communication. Rapide facilitates the design of system architecture and behavior by (1) providing language features to realize system designs, (2) providing an expressive model for capturing the execution behavior of systems, and (3) providing techniques and tools for analyzing system execution behavior. This paper introduces the essential concepts of Rapide and gives an example of system design using Rapide. Rapide has 4 sublanguages -- (1) a type language, (2) an architecture definition language, (3) a constraint language and (4) an executable language. The paper introduces the Rapide architecture sublanguage and the Rapide constraint sublanguage. The Rapide model of system execution is a set of significant events partially ordered by causality (also called posets). This paper discusses Rapide execution models and compares them with totally ordered event based models. Rapide provides tools to check constraints on posets to browse posets and to animate events on a system architecture. This paper briefly discusses the Rapide analysis tools.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/97/725/CSL-TR-97-725.pdf