Object-Oriented Distributed and Parallel I/O Streams

: Writing programs for parallel and distributed computing environments can be significantly more complex than writing programs for their sequential counterparts. These complexities mainly arise from the additional synchronization and communication requirements imposed by such environments. These requirements also make debugging and maintaining such programs significantly more complicated. The problem of debugging and maintenance is further exacerbated by the lack of good debuggers and the lack of proper I/O support for such environments. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of an objectoriented streams library (piostream) which provides convenient and extensible constructs for input and output in parallel and distributed programming environments. These environments include multi-threaded applications, multiprocessors, and distributed systems. Our design is based on the familiar C++ iostream library. Thus simplifying the use of I/O operations in parallel and distribu..