To appear at (HIPS'99), San Juan, Puerto Rico, USA, April 12, 1999
Abstract
Distributed objects as defined by OMG's CORBA architecture provide a
model for object-oriented parallel distributed computing. The
parallelism in this model however is limited in that the distribution
refers to the mappings of different objects to different hosts, and
not to the distribution of any individual object. We propose in this
paper an alternative model called Distributed-Object which allows an
individual large object to be distributed over a network, thus
providing a high level interface for the exploitation of parallelism
inside the computation of each object which was left out of the
distributed objects model. Moreover, we propose a set of functionally
orthogonal operations for the objects which allow the objects to be
recursively divided, combined, and communicate over recursively
divided address space. Programming by divide-and-conquer is therefore
effectively supported under this framework. Recursive distributed
object has been adopted as the primary parallel programming model in
the Brokered Objects for Ragged Network Gigaflops} (BORG) project at
the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, and
applied to large-scale real-world problems.
