Coordinated atomic actions as a technique for implementing distributed gamma computation

The intentions of this paper are to discuss Coordinated Atomic (CA) actions and to demonstrate how they can be used in a very new application area. We apply this concept to designing a particular case of the Gamma computation al paradigm, i.e. distributed Gamma computation. Within our approach, each Gamma reaction is an action. We demonstrate how Gamma computation can be ef fectively implemented in conventional distributed message passing systems u sing CA actions. The paper discusses our design and the benefits we gain by applying CA actions: allowing as much concurrency as possible, together wi th guaranteeing data consistency, a better system structuring, clear separa tion of different system levels, and additional flexibility. This experimen tal design and the Java implementation allow us to conclude that CA actions are a very powerful paradigm which can be used for implementing many compl ex systems and, in particular, software to support some parallel computatio nal models and paradigms. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All r ights reserved.