A compositional approach to concurrent object-oriented programming

Abstract

This paper presents a model of concurrent objectoriented programming in which specification of computational behavior is separated from specification of interaction behavior of methods. I t will be shown that this compositional approach to concurrent programming avoids some of the conceptual dificulties that have plagued the integration of concurrency and object-oriented models of programs. The compositional approach to concurrent object-oriented programming leads to declarative and incremental specification of interaction behavior and thus, to objecdmethod de3nitions that can be readily adapted to different parallel execution environments. The approach supports inheritance of both method and synchronization specifkations. It will be shown that compositional programming avoids the so-called "inheritance anomaly.''

The Nexus Approach to Integrating Multithreading and Communication

“…Parallel libraries and languages that use Nexus include nPerl [27], an RPC extension to the Perl 5 scripting language used for writing systems administration and management programs; an implementation of the MPI message-passing standard based on the MPICH [31] framework; the CAVEcomm communication library [18], used to achieve client-server interactions between high-performance computing applications and the CAVE virtual reality system; and a variety of high level parallel programming languages including CC++ [10], CYES-C++ [41], and Fortran M [25].…”

“…Our proposed global pointer and remote service request mechanisms have been incorporated into a multithreaded communication library called Nexus [26], which we and others have used to build a variety of higher-level communication libraries [31,27,18] and to implement several parallel languages [10,41,25]. We use a Nexus implementation to perform detailed performance studies of our proposed communication mechanisms on several parallel platforms.…”

Support for extensibility and reusability in a concurrent object-oriented programming language

“…The implementations of ml and m2, thus, are not inherited in S . [20]. Since specifications of methods include specifications of both computational and interaction behaviors, any changes in the interaction behavior may, therefore, require changes in the implementation as well.…”

Designing reusable software components following the CSP distributed programming model

“…This separation has proved to be an useful design strategy in the development of parallel and distributed applications. In [7] a programming methodology to improve the compositionality of concurrent programs based on the encapsulation and separated description of the computational behaviour from the interaction behaviour, is proposed. In [SI, a parallel programming system that allows to encapsulate frequently used parallel structuring patterns as reusable code skeletons, is described.…”