A FLEXIBLE OPERATION EXECUTION MODEL FOR SHARED DISTRIBUTED OBJECTS

Many parallel and distributed programming models are based on some for m of shared objects, which may be represented in various ways (e.g., s ingle-copy, replicated, and partitioned objects). Also, many different operation execution strategies have been designed for each representa tion. In programming systems that use multiple representations integra ted in a single object model, one way to provide multiple execution st rategies is to implement each strategy independently from the others. However, this leads to rigid systems and provides little opportunity f or code reuse. Instead, we propose a flexible operation execution mode l that allows the implementation of many different strategies, which c an even be changed at runtime. We present the model and a distributed implementation of it. Also, we describe how various execution strategi es can be expressed using the model. and we look at applications that benefit from its flexibility.