Domain-specific modelling for coordination engineering with SCOPE

Abstract

The demand for increasing performance is a continuous trend in computing. Today's multi-core processors and future many-core processors require software developers to exploit concurrency in software as far as possible. To ease the task of developing concurrent software we present our Coordination-First approach and the coordination modelling language SCOPE that introduces the space-based choreography of processes, which internally orchestrate fine-grained workflow activities. The main contributions are (1) the Coordination-First approach that addresses the conformance to higher-level concurrency models in a standardised way by regarding the coordination model of a concurrent program as the first artefact in the software development process using model-driven software engineering techniques, (2) the coordination language SCOPE which conforms to the well-known BPMN 2.0 and differentiates between the space-based choreography of multiple concurrent process components and the orchestration of fine-grained activities within a single process component, and (3) the SCOPE workbench - an implementation of SCOPE based on the Xtext language framework to show the feasibility of our approach.