Emergent behaviour of aspects in high performance and distributed computing

• Authors: Sasa Subotic;Judith Bishop
• Venue: SAICSIT '05 Proceedings of the 2005 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on IT research in developing countries
• Year: 2005

In this paper we discuss the characteristics of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP), and the development of new or existing applications using AOP. Aspects are emerging everywhere, and there is a particular need to introduce and practice them strategically in areas such as parallel and distributed computing. We will show that this attractive technology is useful for solving the problems of code scattering and tangling in high performance parallel computing. The performance related aspects are most noticeable for high performance applications. Then we discuss AOP impact in the distributed environment. Programming in a distributed environment is a complex task where object orientation has been of limited success in managing crosscutting concerns such as synchronization, scheduling, fault tolerance and security. Our aspect research vehicle at the Polelo Research Group is the Algon distributed framework (ALGOrithms on the Net). The focus here is to show how AOP can be applied to an Algon application aiming at a better separation of concerns. Basic examples are logging, debugging and performance related aspects associated with this system. We argue that this modern programming paradigm allows existing systems to be re-designed or modified as a viable approach to improve the functionality and flexibility of the system.