The object-oriented machine: DOOM

Presents a survey of an object-oriented approach to parallel computing, followed at Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, in ESPRIT project 415. The results that are strived for at the end of this five year project, carried out within ESPRIT project 415, are: (1) A prototype Decentralized Object-Oriented Machine, DOOM, consisting of some 100 identical self-contained computers, having a CPU, local memory and communications means, which are connected in a direct packet switching network. Each computer, called a node of the system, has a copy of the operating system kernel. This kernel performs local resource management, and cooperates with the other kernels for global operating system tasks. The prototype DOOM system is connected, as a satellite, to a host computer, where the programming environment resides. (2) A Parallel Object-Oriented Language, POOL, in which significant application programs can be programmed. The languages provides the user with control of parallelism and granularity. (3) Two significant applications in the area of symbolic processing that demonstrate the performance increase through parallelism on DOOM. The first of these is a parallel theorem prover, applied to the verification of VLSI circuit designs. The second is a parallel version of the analytical component of the Rosetta natural language translation system