Abstract

This report studies a model of computation (MoC) that supports Push-Pull communication between software components. Push represents message transfer that is initiated by the producer. On the contrast, Pull represents message transfer that is initiated by the consumer. Push-Pull messaging mechanisms have been used in various domains, such as the CORBA Event service, the Click modular router, inter-process communication among multi-processors, data dissemination in a peer to peer network. Formalizing the computation and communication in these domains to a MoC facilitates reusability of programming models and software architectures, and allows user to model and analyze more complex systems. This model of computation has been implemented as the Component Interaction (CI) domain in Ptolemy II, a hierarchical and heterogeneous modeling environment. Composition of the CI domain with other domains in Ptolemy II is discussed. This report also connects CI to other data-flow models of computation, such as Process Networks (PN), Synchronous Data Flow (SDF) and Dynamic Data Flow (DDF), and discusses

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