The Extension of Object-Oriented Languages to a Homogenous, Concurrent Architecture

A homogeneous machine architecture, consisting of a regular interconnection of many identical elements, exploits the economic benefits of VLSI technology, A concurrent programming model is presented that is related to object oriented languages such as Simula and Smalltalk. Techniques are developed which permit the execution of general purpose object oriented programs on a homogeneous machine. Both the hardware architecture and the supporting software algorithms are demonstrated to scale their performance with the size of the system. The program objects communicate by passing messages. Objects may move about in the system and may have an arbitrary pointer topology, A distributed, on-the-fly garbage collection algorithm is presented which operates by message passing. Simulation of the algorithm demonstrates its ability to collect obsolete objects over the entire machine with acceptable overhead costs. Algorithms for maintaining the locality of object references and for implementing a virtual object capability are also presented. To insure the absence of hardware bottlenecks, a number of interconnection strategies are discussed and simulated for use in a homogeneous machine. Of those considered, the Boolean N-cube connection is demonstrated to provide the necessary characteristics. The object oriented machine will provide increased performance as its size is increased. It can execute a general purpose, concurrent, object oriented language where the size of the machine and its interconnection topology are transparent to the programmer

A simple approach to distributed objects in prolog

We present the design of a distributed object system for Prolog, based on adding remote execution and distribution capabilities to a previously existing object system. Remote execution brings RPC into a Prolog system, and its semantics is easy to express in terms of well-known Prolog builtins. The final distributed object design features state mobility and user-transparent network behavior. We sketch an implementation which provides distributed garbage collection and some degree of tolerance to network failures. We provide a preliminary study of the overhead of the communication mechanism for some test cases

A Cyclic Distributed Garbage Collector for Network Objects

This paper presents an algorithm for distributed garbage collection and outlines its implementation within the Network Objects system. The algorithm is based on a reference listing scheme, which is augmented by partial tracing in order to collect distributed garbage cycles. Processes may be dynamically organised into groups, according to appropriate heuristics, to reclaim distributed garbage cycles. The algorithm places no overhead on local collectors and suspends local mutators only briefly. Partial tracing of the distributed graph involves only objects thought to be part of a garbage cycle: no collaboration with other processes is required. The algorithm offers considerable flexibility, allowing expediency and fault-tolerance to be traded against completeness

Garbage collection auto-tuning for Java MapReduce on Multi-Cores

MapReduce has been widely accepted as a simple programming pattern that can form the basis for efficient, large-scale, distributed data processing. The success of the MapReduce pattern has led to a variety of implementations for different computational scenarios. In this paper we present MRJ, a MapReduce Java framework for multi-core architectures. We evaluate its scalability on a four-core, hyperthreaded Intel Core i7 processor, using a set of standard MapReduce benchmarks. We investigate the significant impact that Java runtime garbage collection has on the performance and scalability of MRJ. We propose the use of memory management auto-tuning techniques based on machine learning. With our auto-tuning approach, we are able to achieve MRJ performance within 10% of optimal on 75% of our benchmark tests

System Description for a Scalable, Fault-Tolerant, Distributed Garbage Collector

We describe an efficient and fault-tolerant algorithm for distributed cyclic garbage collection. The algorithm imposes few requirements on the local machines and allows for flexibility in the choice of local collector and distributed acyclic garbage collector to use with it. We have emphasized reducing the number and size of network messages without sacrificing the promptness of collection throughout the algorithm. Our proposed collector is a variant of back tracing to avoid extensive synchronization between machines. We have added an explicit forward tracing stage to the standard back tracing stage and designed a tuned heuristic to reduce the total amount of work done by the collector. Of particular note is the development of fault-tolerant cooperation between traces and a heuristic that aggressively reduces the set of suspect objects.Comment: 47 pages, LaTe

A distributed Real-Time Java system based on CSP

CSP is a fundamental concept for developing software for distributed real time systems. The CSP paradigm constitutes a natural addition to object orientation and offers higher order multithreading constructs. The CSP channel concept that has been implemented in Java deals with single- and multi-processor environments and also takes care of the real time priority scheduling requirements. For this, the notion of priority and scheduling has been carefully examined and as a result it was reasoned that priority scheduling should be attached to the communicating channels rather than to the processes. In association with channels, a priority based parallel construct is developed for composing processes: hiding threads and priority indexing from the user. This approach simplifies the use of priorities for the object oriented paradigm. Moreover, in the proposed system, the notion of scheduling is no longer connected to the operating system but has become part of the application instead