Distributed Computing

An important tool in defining the objects to be used in scientific computing comes from a mapping of the physical model into the computational environment. If the objects are made to correspond to physical elements in the underlying model, the paradigm fits very well. Since all of the information an object needs is stored internally, an object can also provide a good representation for a thread of control. This can greatly assist in the development of parallel applications in a way that is

independent of the hard ware on which it is being run. One can logically define the necessary number of threads (or processes) required for a given problem without worrying about the number of physical processors. This is analogous to not worrying about the size of vector registers in a supercomputer or the actual number of processors in a Thinking Machines Corporation Connection Machine.

A number of these ideas have been implemented in a distributed particle simulation code, which is reported on in the 1990 USENEX C++ conference proceedings (Forslund et al. 1990). The distributed environment for this code is the ISIS programming environment developed at Cornell University by Ken Birman (1990) and his colleagues.