Distributed prototyping from validated specifications

We present vp12cxx, a translator that automatically generates efficient, fully distributed C++ code from high-level system designs specified in the mathematically rigorous VPL design language. The Concurrency Workbench of the New Century (CWB-NC) verification tool includes a front end for VPL, and this means designers may use the full range of automatic verification and simulation checks provided by the tool before invoking the translator, thereby generating distributed prototypes from validated specifications. Besides being fully distributed, the code generated by vp12cxx is highly readable and portable to a host of execution environments and real-time operating systems (RTOSes). This is achieved by encapsulating all generated code dealing with low-level interprocess communication issues in a library for synchronous communication, which in turn is built upon the ACE client-server network programming interface. Finally, benchmarks show that the performance of the generated code is more than acceptable fo r a distributed prototype. We discuss one such example in the RETHER real-time ethernet protocol for voice and video applications.