An overview of the REX software architecture

The authors describe the software architecture currently under development for the REX (reconfigurable and extensible parallel and distributed systems) project, supported by the European Economic Community under the ESPRIT II initiative. The architecture is aimed at supporting the construction of reconfigurable and extensible parallel and distributed systems. The main principle underlying this architecture is that systems should be described, constructed, and modified as a structural configuration of interconnected component instances. The structure should be described by a separate explicit configuration language allowing components to be programmed in a range of heterogeneous programming languages. The authors given an informal description of three elements of architecture, namely, an interface specification language, a set of communication primitives, and a language for describing overall system structure, called Darwin. Examples of the use of these are given, together with an overview of how they integrate to support construction and reconfiguration of distributed systems