NUTS - A DISTRIBUTED OBJECT-ORIENTED PLATFORM WITH HIGH-LEVEL COMMUNICATION FUNCTIONS

An extensible object-oriented platform NUTS for distributed computing is described which is based on an object-oriented programming environm ent NUT which supports automatic synthesis of programs. It is built on top of the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM), and hides all low-level fe atures of the latter. The language of NUTS is a concurrent object-orie nted programming language with coarse-grained parallelism and distribu ted shared memory communication model implemented on a distributed mem ory architecture. It differs from other languages of concurrent progra mming in the following: concurrent processes are represented by packag es which are semantically richer entities than objects, inter-process communication is performed in terms of classes, objects, scripts and p ackages, using the EDA communication model; processes can be arranged into structured collections: grids which enable one to program data-pa rallel computations on a high level; sequential segments of programs c an be synthesized automatically from specifications represented as cla sses using the program synthesis features of NUT. Examples of usage of generic parallel computing control structures PARDIF and PARARR are g iven.