Recursive individually distributed object

Abstract

Distributed Objects (DO) as defined by OMG's CORBA architecture provide a model for object-oriented parallel distributed computing. The parallelism in this model however is limited in that the distribution refers to the mappings of different objects to different hosts, and not to the distribution of any individual object. We propose in this paper an alternative model called Individually Distributed Object (IDO) which allows a single large object to be distributed over a network, thus providing a high level interface for the exploitation of parallelism inside the computation of each object which was left out of the distributed objects model. Moreover, we propose a set of functionally orthogonal operations for the objects which allow the objects to be recursively divided, combined, and communicate over recursively divided address space. Programming by divide-and-conquer is therefore effectively supported under this framework. The Recursive Individually Distributed Object (RIDO) has been adopted as the primary parallel programming model in the Brokered Objects for Ragged-network Gigafiops (BORG) project at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, and applied to large-scale real-world problems.