Distributed Eiffel: a language for programming multi-granular distributed objects on the Clouds operating system

The design and implementation of Distributed Eiffel, a language designed and implemented for distributed programming, on top of the Clouds operating system by extending the object-oriented language Eiffel are discussed. The language presents a programming paradigm based on objects of multiple granularity. While large-grained persistent objects serve as units of distribution, fine-grained objects are used to describe and manipulate entities within these units. The language design makes it possible to implement both shared-memory and message-passing models of parallel programming within a single programming paradigm. The language provides features with which the programmer can declaratively fine-tune synchronization at any desired object granularity and maximize concurrency. With the primitives provided, it is possible to combine and control both data migration and computation migration effectively, at the language level. The design addresses such issues as parameter passing, asynchronous invocations and result claiming, and concurrency control