Object oriented parallel programming

The paper presents general concepts of object oriented parallel processing; it also compares two of the most widely used OOPP techniques, PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) and MPI (message passing interface), and introduces the SCOOP (scalable object oriented programming) approach to support the design and execution of parallel applications. As parallel programming tools are progressively being adopted, parallel applications are becoming less platform independent. PVM and MPI are tools that have enabled portable parallel programming. Portability and platform independence is of prime importance in parallel programming as parallel processes execute simultaneously on potentially different platforms. Key factors affecting the performance of parallel applications on a target platform are parallelism, granularity, load balancing and scalability. The SCOOP system is a step forward in the development of techniques for dynamic granularity control, applied to parallel OO languages.