The Collaborative State Machines (CSM) project introduces a unified programming model for developing applications across the Cloud–Edge–IoT continuum. As distributed applications become increasingly complex, existing component-centric approaches often result in fragmented architectures, making coordination, state management, and global optimization difficult. CSM addresses these challenges by enabling developers to model an entire distributed system as a single coherent entity, providing system-wide visibility and simplifying orchestration across heterogeneous computing environments.

🌐 Project website:
https://collaborativestatemachines.github.io/

Objectives

The CSM project’s core mission is to simplify the development and management of distributed applications by providing a programming model that integrates coordination, state management, and execution across the computing continuum.

Key objectives include:

1. Unified system modeling enabling developers to describe complete distributed applications as a single hierarchical model rather than as isolated components.
2. Efficient state and data management through explicit data scoping mechanisms that reduce unnecessary synchronization and improve data locality.
3. Separation of coordination and execution logic by combining high-level state management with external services responsible for computation and hardware interaction.
4. Providing a runtime environment for continuum-scale applications capable of managing distributed state machines from edge devices to cloud infrastructures.

Relevance

Modern cloud-edge-IoT applications require coordination among highly heterogeneous resources distributed across multiple administrative and geographical domains. Traditional programming approaches often expose developers to low-level communication mechanisms, fragmented application structures, and complex synchronization challenges.

CSM provides a system-level programming abstraction for designing, executing, and optimizing distributed applications across the computing continuum.

The CSM ecosystem provides:

• A hierarchical programming model that represents distributed applications as a unified system structure, enabling global reasoning and optimization.
• Native data scoping mechanisms for controlling data visibility and placement across global, local, and state-specific contexts.
• CSML, a declarative domain-specific language for specifying application behavior without requiring low-level communication management.
• Cirrina, an open-source runtime environment for managing state machine execution and coordination across edge and cloud infrastructures.

By combining system-wide visibility, explicit state management, and flexible execution models, CSM enables the development of scalable, adaptable, and efficient applications for the next generation of distributed computing systems.