ozalp@dm.unibo.it (02/06/91)
a technical report describing the paralex system being developed by my group is available via anonymous ftp on the following hosts: tosca.dm.unibo.it (130.136.1.1) as ~ftp/pub/tr/paralex.ps.Z cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu (128.84.254.3) as ~ftp/pub/paralex.ps.Z i would appreciate if you could drop me line of e-mail if you should pick it up. i am enclosing the abstract from the report. -- Paralex: An Environment for Parallel Programming in Distributed Systems Ozalp Babaoglu Lorenzo Alvisi Alessandro Amoroso Renzo Davoli Department of Mathematics University of Bologna Piazza Porta S. Donato, 5 40127 Bologna, Italy It is our thesis that a distributed system can be programmed, monitored, debugged and generally thought of as if it were a single, uniform multiprocessor machine. The technical issues that need to be addressed in supporting this abstraction include fault tolerance, architectural heterogeneity and high latency of the communication network. The Paralex Project is aimed at testing this thesis for the class of applications that can be described using a data flow-like semantics. The interface presented to the programmer makes extensive use of graphics to define, edit, execute and debug applications. All of the necessary code for distributing the application across a network and replicating it to achieve the desired level of fault tolerance is automatically generated by the system. In this paper we give an overview of Paralex and present the status of a prototype implementation. -- Ozalp Babaoglu E-mail: ozalp@dm.unibo.it University of Bologna, Dept. of Mathematics Piazza di Porta S. Donato, 5 TEL: +39 51 354430 40127 Bologna (ITALY) FAX: +39 51 354490