Object-Based Subcontracting for Parallel Programming on Loosely-coupled Distributed Systems

Several languages have been proposed to support concurrency in object-oriented programming. However, these languages do not address issues which are specific to parallel programming on loosely coupled distributed systems such as dynamic load variation, fault tolerance and scalability. We propose a new paradigm called object based subcontracting for parallel programming on loosely-coupled distributed systems. In this paradigm, a metaclass called Parclass is defined to create a metaobject. The metaobject aggregates objects belonging to a class. A member function of the class, which can be executed concurrently on all the objects, is invoked as a subcontract on the metaobject. The metaobject manages the subcontract by employing various nodes of the network. The subcontract invocation is made fault tolerant and scalable.