An architecture for concurrent, peer-to-peer components
Randall Bramley, Kenneth Chiu · 2001
Software components are increasingly seen as the preferred technique for the construction of flexible, large-scale systems. Forces such as economic globalization and the Internet explosion mean that today's software must interoperate in a dynamic, heterogeneous, distributed environment. Components are only one aspect of the solution, but the ability to partition a system into granular, minimally-dependent pieces is an important facilitator. A number of component middleware designs have emerged, primarily from the business and scientific communities. These standard architectures generally derive from distributed object architectures. While this approach has the obvious benefit of using established techniques such as remote method invocation, the introduction of different interaction concepts can simplify the development of some applications. This dissertation presents new paradigms for enhancing the performance and ease-of-development of tightly-coupled, peer-to-peer components. Particular emphasis is placed on enabling pipelined concurrency, which is important for maintaining frame rate in such applications as scientific visualization. The dissertation also presents a “pluggable” architecture for implementing layered protocols. As part of the dissertation, a reference implementation was developed and tested. The results confirm that the new paradigms can be implemented efficiently. A sample application was also developed using the reference implementation. The sample application shows that the new paradigms can simplify the development of component software.