A Distributed Parallel Object Manager for Smalltalk

In order to exploit the inherent parallelism in distributed systems through object-oriented programming a Distributed Parallel Object Manager for Smalltalk is implemented. In the previous Distributed Smalltalk implementations, the remote operational model is used where the sending process blocks, the receiver process performs the operation, a value is returned, and the sending process then resumes. In the Distributed Parallel Object Manager implementation, the sending process is not blocked, and there exists an environment associated with the local object at the remote host. Parallelism is achieved by using a variation of asynchronous communication; however the problems of asynchronous communication are avoided. Parallelism is implemented as a property of objects; not their classes. For parallel objects, since blocking is not desired between the task of sending a message and receiving its result, when a message is sent to an object, the value returned is a pointer to the result area of the object’s message response.