Many distributed applications have to meet their performance or quality-of-service goals in environments where available resources change contantly. Important classes of distributed applications (including distributed multimedia codes, applications for mobile devices, and computational grid codes) use
runtime adaptation
in order to achieve their goals. The adaptation behavior in these applications is usually programmed in
ad hoc
code that is directly incorporated into the base application, resulting in systems that are complex to develop, maintain, modify, and debug. Furthermore, it is virtually impossible to extract high-level information about adaptive behaviour using program analysis, even if there were compiler and runtime sytems that could exploit such information. The goal of our research is to develop compiler and programming language support to simplify the development and improve the performance of adaptive distribtued applications. We describe a simple set of language extensions for adaptive distributed applications, and discuss potential compiler techniqes to support such appliations. We also propose a task-graph-based framework that can be used to formalize the description of a wide range of adaptation operations.
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