AERN-Net

AERN-Net provides datatypes and abstractions for defining and executing networks of communicating processes. These networks have a fixed topology, which can be infinite via recursion. The communication on each channel is driven by some query-response protocol. Basic protocols for communicating approximations of real numbers and functions are provided together with protocol combinators eg for communicating value pairs or lists and communicating with additional query parameters or with optimised repetitions. An class-based abstraction is provided to make it possible to execute networks on various distributed backends without modification. At the moment there is only one backend, which is not distributed. It is envisaged that truly distributed backends will be added soon, eg based on plain TCP, MPI or REST/SOAP Web services. A mathematical foundation of these networks is described in the draft paper http://www-users.aston.ac.uk/~konecnym/papers/ernets08-draft.html. Simple examples of usage can be found in modules DemoMax and DemoSqrt in folder examples.