G 3

C l a s s I n t e r f a c e S p e c i f i c a t i o n

Version 0.1 - Preliminary Draft

December 20, 1999

Frank McKenna and Gregory L. Fenves

PEER, University of California at Berkeley

Parallel Classes

To facilitate the development of parallel object-oriented finite element programs, a new framework is presented in this section. The classes in the framework support the aggregate programming model. The new classes are:

• Shadow - A Shadow object represents a remote actor object in the local actor process.

• Actor - An Actor object is a local object in the remote actor process. It performs the operations requested of it by the Shadow object. The actor objects in an aggregation collectively perform the analysis operations by communicating between themselves.

• Channel - The Shadow and Actor objects communicate with each other through Channel objects. A Channel object represents a point in a local actor process through which a local object can send and receive information.

• Address - An Address object represents the location of a Channel object in the machine space. Channel objects send information to other Channel objects, whose locations are given by an Address object. Channel objects also receive information from other Channel objects, whose locations are given by an Address object.

• MovableObject - A MovableObject is an object which can send its state from one actor process to another.

• ObjectBroker - An ObjectBroker is an object in a local actor process for creating new objects.

• MachineBroker - A MachineBroker is an object in a local actor process that is responsible for creating remote actor processes at the request of Shadow objects in the same local process.