Object oriented design in a real-time multiprocessor environment
K. McQuown · 1989
Object Oriented Design (OOD), with its emphasis on data encapsulation and rigorously defined message passing interfaces, offers great possibilities for improving the reliability and maintainability of large-scale software. These improvements are made feasible for the first time in military avionics applications by the recent emergence of new computers with significant increases in processing power and memory capacity. Ironically, this newly available hardware, because it features modularity and multiprocessing, calls for distributed software, and thereby introduces an interesting challenge to the Object Oriented software view. The message passing or operation invoking interface between two objects which reside on the same processor is well defined and readily handled within the OOD paradigm. How to extend the paradigm to cover two objects hosted on two different processors requires some thought, since only data, not tasks, can be passed from one processor to another