POOL and DOOM: A survey of Esprit 415 subproject A, Philips Research Laboratories

This paper surveys the concepts of the Parallel Object-Oriented Language POOL and a highly parallel, general purpose computer system for execution of programs in this language: the Decentralized Object-Oriented Machine, DOOM. It treats the research and design performed at Philips Research Laboratories in the framework of Esprit project 415. In the Parallel Object-Oriented Language POOL, a program is subdivided into a large number of so-called objects, which communicate by sending messages. The language offers explicit parallelism and support for structuring large applications to be executed on DOOM, the Decentralized Object-Oriented Machine. The DOOM architecture consists of a collection of self contained computers, comprising a CPU, local memory and a communication unit to connect these computers via a point-to-point packet switching network. The first section presents a short overview of the goals and premises of the subproject. In Section 2 the programming language POOL and its characteristics are introduced. Section 3 presents the DOOM machine starting from an abstract machine model for the execution of POOL programs. With this description as a basis, the prototype implementations of the DOOM hardware architecture, the DOOM operating system and the POOL to DOOM compiler are presented. Section 4 deals with applications that we are investigating at the Philips Research Laboratories. Finally, in Section 5 the current status of the project and our future plans will be indicated.