Paradigm-Oriented Distributed Computing using Mobile Agents

We describe the implementation underlying an environment for distributed computing that uses the concept of well-known paradigms. The main advantage of paradigmoriented distributed computing is that the user only needs to specify application-specific sequential code, while the underlying infrastructure takes care of the parallelization and distribution. The main features of the proposed approach, called PODC, which differentiate it from other approaches, are the following: (1) It is intended for looselycoupled network environments, not specialized multiprocessors; (2) it is based on an infrastructure of mobile agents; (3) it supports programming in C, rather than a functional or special-purpose language, and (4) it provides a Webbased interactive graphics interface through which programs are constructed, invoked, and monitored. The three paradigms presently supported in PODC are the bag-oftasks, the branch-and-bound, and genetic programming. We describe their implementation and performance within the mobile agent-based PODC environment.