Flexible Collective Operations for Distributed Object Groups

Collective operations on multiple distributed objects are a powerful means to coordinate parallel computations. In this paper we present an inheritance based approach to implement parallel collective operations on distributed object groups. Object groups are described as reusable application-speci c classes that coordinate both operation propagation to group members as well as the global collection (reduction) of the computed results. Thus collective operations can be controlled by applications using language-level inheritance mechanisms. Existing group classes as well as global coordination patterns can therefore e ectively