Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

We compare four paradigms that have recently been the subject of considerable attention: mobile agents, distributed shared memory (DSM) systems, coordination paradigms, and self-migrating threads. We place these paradigms in a common frame work consisting of three layers: the computational model, the implementation of the computational model on a physical architecture, and the interface between the computational model and the system's environment. We consider two examples of self-migrating thread systems—MESSENGERS and WAVE—and place these into the same framework to illustrate their relationship to the other related lines of research in terms of their capabilities to organize and coordinate computation, map the concurrent activities onto a multicomputer architecture, and provide an interface for interaction with their environments on the underlying host computers.