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Section: Software and Platforms

HOCL-tools

Contact:

Cédric Tedeschi, Cedric.Tedeschi@irisa.fr

Status:

Version 1.0 to be released in open source

License:

TBD

Presentation:

HOCL (Higher Order Chemical Language) is a chemical programming language based on the chemical metaphor presented before (see Section  3.5 ). It was developed for several years within the PARIS and Myriads teams. Within HOCL, following the chemical metaphor, computations can be regarded as chemical reactions, and data can be seen as molecules which participate in these reactions. If a certain condition is held, the reaction will be triggered, thus continuing until it gets inert: no more data can satisfy any computing conditions. To realize this program paradigm, a multiset is implemented to act as a chemical tank, containing necessary data and rules. An HOCL program is then composed of two parts: chemical rule definitions (reaction rules) and multiset definition (data). More specifically, HOCL provides the high order: reaction rules are molecules that can be manipulated like any other molecules. In other words, HOCL programs can manipulate other HOCL programs.

An HOCL compiler was developed using Java to execute some chemical programs expressed with HOCL. This compiler is based on the translation of HOCL programs to Java code. As a support for service coordination and service adaptation, we recently extended the HOCL compiler with the support of decentralized workflow execution. Works around the implementation of a distributed multiset gave birth to an underlying layer for this compiler, making it able to deploy HOCL programs transparently over large scale platforms. This last part is currently considered to be interfaced with the current HOCL compiler. All these features are planned to be released under the common name of HOCL-tools.

Active contributors (from Myriads project-team):

Marko Obrovac, Cédric Tedeschi.

Impact:

The compiler is used as a tool within the team to develop HOCL programs. The decentralized workflow execution support has been used extensively to produce results published and presented at several conferences. It is also used in the framework of the DALHIS (http://project.inria.fr/dalhis ) associated team.