Distributed Coordination with MESSENGERS

Abstract messengers is a paradigm for the programming of distributed systems. It is based on the principles of autonomous messages, called Messengers, which carry their own behavior in the form of a program. This enables them to navigate freely in the underlying computational network, communicate with one another, and invoke compiled node-resident C functions in the nodes they visit. Hence, a distributed application is viewed as a collection of C functions whose invocation and interoperation is orchestrated by Messengers. This provides for a clear separation between computations, as expressed by the individual node functions, and coordination, which is the order of function invocations and the transport of information among them as prescribed by Messengers. This separation allows each layer to be designed and implemented separately. It also supports the reuse of the coordination structures and the interactive and incremental development and use of distributed applications.

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