Connection Management in Reconfigurable Distributed Systems

The Programmer's Playground takes a new approach to simplifying and supporting the construction of distributed applications. The approach, called I/O abstraction, separates the description of a system's communication structure from the descriptions of its computational components so that software modules written in existing programming languages cna be integrated flexibly and dynamically by both programmers and end-users. This separation is achieved by estabishing logical connectinos among the data interfaces of independent software modules. The logical connections provide a uniform high-level view of communication for both discrete and continuous data. The I/O abstraction approach inherits ideas from the I/O automaton model, a formal model of distributed computing that provides compositionality properties and supports behavioral specifications of system modules. Implications of I/O abstraction for process migration and the ordering of events in a distributed system will be studied. Software supporting the I/O abstraction programming model will be constructed. A high speed ATM network developed at Washington University will be used as a testbed for the devlopment work. The availability of this campus network offers an unusual opportunity... Read complete abstract on page 2.