| EPSRC Reference: |
GR/K27957/01 |
| Title: |
A VIRTUAL MULTICOMPUTER |
| Principal Investigator: |
Padget, Dr J |
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| Department: |
Mathematical Sciences |
| Organisation: |
University of Bath |
| Scheme: |
Standard Research (Pre-FEC) |
| Starts: |
15 October 1994 |
Ends: |
14 December 1997 |
Value (£): |
168,779
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
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The aim is to construct a virtual multicomputer to support the rapid prototyping, development and monitoring of distributed symbolic applications. A (physical) multicomputer is several networked heterogeneous computing systems; a virtual multicomputer, by analogy with virtual memory, will provide as many instances of whatever architectural classes the problem requires. The project objectives are: a portable lightweight platform to support the virtual multicomputer, leading to distributed garbage collection, process migration, fault tolerance, virtual shared objects, persistence, support for SIMD and SPMD programming models, and a programming environment providing support for distributed debugging and performance analysis and tuning. The demonstrator applications for the system are in computer algebra, statistics and AI.Progress:The development of the portable lightweight execution environment is almost complete with the first release due at the end of February 1995. This platform supports the execution of processor independent compiled Lisp programs, while also providing a tight integration with C, such that C can call Lisp, so applications may use it as an extension scripting language, and Lisp can call C, giving the means for access to network interfaces, visualisation tools and many other libraries. The particular member of the Lisp family we support is called EuLisp and offers an unique combination of features: modules, total use of objects, a meta-object protocol and lightweight processes.There has also been progress on others of the early objectives: the distributed garbage collection algorithm has been prototyped, as has a first version of the process migration mechanism. Both of these currently rely on using PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) library and have been tested over local area networks. This will be extended to wide area working in the medium term, since this project is joint with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. More detailed information about the project and the people involved, as well as more up-to-date information can be found on the projects WWW page at:http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masjap/Denton
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Key Findings |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.bath.ac.uk |