Ss. Yau et al., OBJECT-ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT OF ARCHITECTURE TRANSPARENT SOFTWARE FOR DISTRIBUTED PARALLEL SYSTEMS, Computer communications, 16(5), 1993, pp. 317-327
Compared with programming sequential computers, programming distribute
d parallel computing systems has additional complexity due to the cons
iderations of parallelism, synchronization, the network configuration
of the distributed computing system, and the topology of the parallel
processors. Current programming practices, however, are not sufficient
to make effective use of such computing systems. In this paper, an ap
proach to software development for distributed parallel processing sys
tems which is architecture transparent is presented. This approach is
based on the object-oriented concept, and facilitates the design and c
oding of software by separating the architecture-dependent issues from
the semantics of the software. This makes the software system indepen
dent of the target machine or the network configuration. and easily po
rtable to other machines. In our approach, the parallelism is implicit
in the program, and the programmer does not need to be concerned with
issues such as synchronization, network configuration or the topology
of the parallel processors. Our approach can reduce the communication
and synchronization errors caused by the programmer by automatically
embedding the proper codes during the translation and allocation phase
s of the software development cycle.