Support for consistency-preserving dynamic reconfigurations in distributed systems

The author presents a model with its linguistic and operational support for implementing consistency-preserving reconfigurations of distributed applications. This model extends the configuration-programming approach, where a distributed program is implemented at a programming and a configuration level and where dynamic changes are expressed only at the configuration level, i.e. as modifications of the connectivity structure among the parallel executing components. In this approach, besides the communication interface, every component of the application owns a reconfiguration interface, which defines the reconfiguration-specific interactions between the application processes and the reconfiguration processing. With such an interface, application and reconfiguration concerns can be well separated and existing applications can be easily upgraded to support consistency-preserving reconfigurations