Communicating active components: An environment for concurrent applications on parallel machines

Abstract

Programming the multicomputers is often a delicate job. This explains our interest in the design and the implementation of an Object-Oriented Parallel Language for a multicomputer. This work is part of the VCP ( Virtual Class Processor) project. A full Object-Oriented Environment for parallel machines is a long-term goal of this project. This paper presents a unique structuring entity for the multicomputers programming: we call it the Cac (Communicating Active Component). A Cac is an entity which includes an activity which runs a behavioral function, a local context and a mailbox. The behavioral functions and the associated created Cac/s are partitioned in modules which gather the code of application and the subset of Cac/s. The modules are located on the nodes of target machine and a module can be duplicated onto many nodes. The module programming and the modules' duplication are two tools of distribution. The distribution of behavioral functions in the modules can be relayed just before the application execution. This can be tuned according to the machine configuration and the network. We will present the implementation realized on the Parsytec Multicluster II, a Transputer-based multicomputer, under the Helios operating system.