The theme of this paper is profunctors, and their centrality and ubiquity in understanding concurrent computation. Profunctors (a.k.a. distributors, or bimodules) are a generalisation of relations to categories. Here they are first presented and motivated via spans of event structures, and the semantics of nondeterministic dataflow. Profunctors are shown to play a key role in relating models for concurrency and to support an interpretation as higher-order processes (where input and output may be processes). Two recent directions of research are described. One is concerned with a language and computational interpretation for profunctors. This addresses the duality between input and output in profunctors. The other is to investigate general spans of event structures (the spans can be viewed as special profunctors) to give causal semantics to higher-order processes. For this it is useful to generalise event structures to allow events which “persist.”

: The paper shows that characterizing the causal relationship between significant events is an important but non-trivial aspect for understanding the behavior of distributed programs. An introduction to the notion of causality and its relation to logical time is given; some fundamental results concerning the characterization of causality are presented. Recent work on the detection of causal relationships in distributed computations is surveyed. The issue of observing distributed computations in a causally consistent way and the basic problems of detecting global predicates are discussed. To illustrate the major difficulties, some typical monitoring and debugging approaches are assessed, and it is demonstrated how their feasibility is severely limited by the fundamental problem to master the complexity of causal relationships. Keywords: Distributed Computation, Causality, Distributed System, Causal Ordering, Logical Time, Vector Time, Global Predicate Detection, Distributed Debugging, ...

The strict globular omega-categories formalize the execution paths of a parallel automaton and the homotopies between them. One associates to such (and any) omega-category C three homology theories. The first one is called the globular homology. It contains the oriented loops of C. The two other ones are called the negative (resp. positive) corner homology. They contain in a certain manner the branching areas of execution paths or negative corners (resp. the merging areas of execution paths or positive corners) of C. Two natural linear maps called the negative (resp. the positive) Hurewicz morphism from the globular homology to the negative (resp. positive) corner homology are constructed. We explain the reason why these constructions allow the reinterpretation of some geometric problems coming from computer science.

. Higher dimensional automata can model concurrent computations. The topological structure of the higher dimensional automata determines certain properties of the concurrent computation. We introduce bicomplexes as an algebraic tool for describing these automata and develop a simple homology theory for higher dimensional automata. We then show how the homology of automata has applications in the study of branching-time equivalences of processes such as bisimulation. 1 Introduction Geometry has been suggested as a tool for modeling concurrency using higher dimensional objects to describe the concurrent execution of processes. This contrasts with earlier models based on the interleaving of computation steps to capture all possible behaviours of a concurrent system. Interleaving models must necessarily commit themselves to a specific choice of atomic action which makes them unable to distinguish between the execution of two truly concurrent actions and two mutually exclusive actions as t...

In this dissertation we investigate presheaf models for concurrent computation. Our aim is to provide a systematic treatment of bisimulation for a wide range of concurrent process calculi. Bisimilarity is defined abstractly in terms of open maps as in the work of Joyal, Nielsen and Winskel. Their work inspired this thesis by suggesting that presheaf categories could provide abstract models for concurrency with a built-in notion of bisimulation. We show how

this paper we consider a very general model of concurrency, the set systems. These are structures C = (E; C) with E a set and C ` 2

This article is intended to provide some new insights about concurrency theory using ideas from geometry, and more specifically from algebraic topology. The aim of the paper is two-fold: we justify applications of geometrical methods in concurrency through some chosen examples and we give the mathematical foundations needed to understand the geometric phenomenon that we identify. In particular we show that the usual notion of homotopy has to be refined to take into account some partial ordering describing the way time goes. This gives rise to some new interesting mathematical problems as well as give some common grounds to computer-scientific problems that have not been precisely related otherwise in the past. The organization of the paper is as follows. In Section 2 we explain to which extent we can use some geometrical ideas in computer science: we list a few of the potential or well known areas of application and try to exemplify some of the properties of concurrent (and distributed) systems we are interested in. We first explain the interest of using some geometric ideas for semantical reasons. Then we take the example of concurrent databases with the problem of finding deadlocks and with some aspects of serializability theory. More general questions about schedules can be asked as well and related to some geometric considerations, even for scheduling micro-instructions (and not only coarse-grained transactions as for databases). The final example is the one of fault-tolerant protocols for distributed systems, where subtle scheduling properties go into play. In Section 3 we give the first few definitions needed for modeling the topological spaces arising from Section 2. Basically, we need to define a topological space containing all traces of executions of the concu...

A local po-space is a gluing of topological spaces which are equipped with a closed partial ordering representing the time flow. They are used as a formalization of higher dimensional automata (see for instance [6]) which model concurrent systems in computer science. It is known [11] that there are two distinct notions of deformation of higher dimensional automata, “spatial” and “temporal”, leaving invariant computer scientific properties like presence or absence of deadlocks. Unfortunately, the formalization of these notions is still unknown in the general case of local po-spaces. We introduce here a particular kind of local po-space, the “globular CW-complexes”, for which we formalize these notions of deformations and which are sufficient to formalize

Concurrency, i.e., the domain in computer science which deals with parallel (asynchronous) computations, has very strong links with algebraic topology; this is what we are developing in this paper, giving a survey of “geometric” models for concurrency. We show that the properties we want to prove on concurrent systems are stable under some form of deformation, which is almost homotopy. In fact, as the “direction ” of time matters, we have to allow deformation only as long as we do not reverse the direction of time. This calls for a new homotopy theory: “directed ” or di-homotopy. We develop some of the geometric intuition behind this theory and give some hints about the algebraic objects one can associate with it (in particular homology groups). For some historic as well as for some deeper reasons, the theory is at a stage where there is a nice blend between cubical, ω-categorical and topological techniques.

We explore the combinatorial properties of the branching areas of execution paths in higher dimensional automata. Mathematically, this means that we investigate the combinatorics of the negative corner (or branching) homology of a globular #-category and the combinatorics of a new homology theory called the reduced branching homology. The latter is the homology of the quotient of the branching complex by the sub-complex generated by its thin elements. Conjecturally it coincides with the non reduced theory for higher dimensional automata, that is #-categories freely generated by precubical sets. As application, we calculate the branching homology of some #-categories and we give some invariance results for the reduced branching homology. We only treat the branching side. The merging side, that is the case of merging areas of execution paths is similar and can be easily deduced from the branching side.