Fine-grained mobility in the Emerald system

  • Authors:
  • Eric Jul;Henry Levy;Norman Hutchinson;Andrew Black

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark;Univ. of Washington, Seattle;Univ. of Arizona, Tucson;Digital Equipment Corporation, Littleton, MA

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
  • Year:
  • 1988

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Abstract

Emerald is an object-based language and system designed for the construction of distributed programs. An explicit goal of Emerald is support for object mobility; objects in Emerald can freely move within the system to take advantage of distribution and dynamically changing environments. We say that Emerald has fine-grained mobility because Emerald objects can be small data objects as well as process objects. Fine-grained mobility allows us to apply mobility in new ways but presents implementation problems as well. This paper discusses the benefits of tine-grained mobility, the Emerald language and run-time mechanisms that support mobility, and techniques for implementing mobility that do not degrade the performance of local operations. Performance measurements of the current implementation are included.