CPA 2009

The Communicating Process Architectures 2009 conference took place as part of Formal Methods Week 2009 at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. CPA 2009 ran from Sunday 1st November through Wednesday 4th November, in the university's Auditorium. The evening Fringe events (Sunday and Monday), including dinner, took place at the Sandton Hotel, Eindhoven. The Conference Dinner took place on Tuesday evening.

All the papers and presentations from CPA 2009 are available from the WoTUG paper collection. The CPA 2009 proceedings are published by IOS Press.

Conference Theme

Communicating Process Architectures addresses many of the key issues in modern computer science and practice. In broad terms, the conference themes will concern concurrency — at all levels of software and hardware granularity. The goal of the conference is to stimulate discussion and ideas as to the role concurrency will play in the future generation of scalable computer infrastructure and applications — where scaling means the ability to ramp up functionality (i.e. stay in control as complexity increases) as well as physical metrics (such as performance).

Traditionally, concurrency has been taught and considered and experienced as an advanced and difficult topic. The thesis underlying this conference is that this tradition is wrong. The natural world operates through the continuous interaction of massive numbers of autonomous agents at all levels of granularity (astronomic, human, sub-atomic). If modern computer science finds concurrency hard, then it is probably not doing it right! It is time for concurrency to mature into a simple discipline that can be used everyday to simplify the way in which we do computing, as well as enhance the performance of what we build, by means of a process-oriented approach to system abstraction and design, in which concurrency is natural and normal. Concurrency is all too often neglected in the engineering of software and a premise underlying this conference is that it should not be neglected in either tuition or use, and need not be difficult, given the right model. Concurrency forms a vital part of the natural abstraction of the world around us, where autonomous agents continually interact at all levels of granularity. It is simply too important to ignore.

The WoTUG forum aims to continue the successful series of yearly conferences. CPA 2009 is the tenth conference under the name of CPA, and the thirty-second in the series of WoTUG conferences.

The aim of the conference is to stimulate ideas and discussions relevant to the engineering of such systems, and in particular to the achievement of scalability (in both function and performance) and integrity (reliability, dependability, and security against error). Security (against error) in concurrent systems is a major element in the conference theme for two reasons. First, concurrency introduces the possibility of new kinds of pathological behaviour, such as deadlock, which must be excluded. Second, applications have become more commonly distributed and highly interactive, but also more intolerant of error. The development of new methods, or adaptation of old methods, for the engineering of such systems thus forms another important focus.

CPA 2008

CPA 2008 was hosted by the University of York.