Object oriented parallel programming: experiments and results
Proceedings of the 1991 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
ActorSpace: an open distributed programming paradigm
PPOPP '93 Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Dynamic selection and reuse of implementations in the object-oriented programming paradigm
SAC '93 Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/SIGAPP symposium on Applied computing: states of the art and practice
Models and languages for parallel computation
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
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To program massively concurrent MIMD machines, programmers need tools for managing complexity. One important tool that has been used in the sequential programming world is hierarchies of abstractions. Unfortunately, most concurrent object-oriented languages construct hierarchical abstractions from objects that serialize — serializing the abstractions. In machines with tens of thousands of processors, unnecessary serialization of this sort can cause significant loss of concurrency.Concurrent Aggregates (CA) is an object-oriented language that allows programmers to build unserialized hierarchies of abstractions by using aggregates. An aggregate in CA is a homogeneous collection of objects (called representatives) that are grouped together and may be referenced by a single aggregate name. Aggregates are integrated into the object model, allowing them to be used wherever an object could be used. Concurrent Aggregates also incorporates several innovative language features that facilitate programming with aggregates. Intra-aggregate addressing aids cooperation between parts of an aggregate. Delegation allows programmers to compose an concurrent aggregate behavior from a number of objects or aggregates. Messages in CA are first class objects that can be used to create message handling abstractions (they handle messages as data). Such abstractions facilitate concurrent operations on aggregates. Continuations are also first class objects. In addition, programmers can construct continuations and use them just like system continuations. User constructed continuations can implement synchronization structures such as a barrier synchronization.