Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

For a variety of reasons, distributed applications often must be implemented using existing conventional programming languages and operating systems. Creating new high performance distributed applications without high-level support from the programming language or operating system requires that themechanism of distribution be selected early in the design stage, reducing the flexibility and/or efficiency of the design and subsequent implementation. Adding distribution to existing applications can result in an inordinate amount of reengineering due to the complexity and heterogeneity of interapplication communication mechanisms and their interfaces.

This paper describes a new architecture for high performance distributed applications and a supporting framework. This architecture applies object-oriented design and implementation techniques to build a framework for platform-independent distributed application specification and implementation using existing programming languages and operating systems. It utilizes an efficient and extensible layering architecture that allows new abstract data types, new protocols, and new interprocess communication mechanisms to be added as they become necessary.