Gop: a Graph-oriented Programming Model for Parallel and Distributed Systems*

The advances of parallel and distributed computing demand high-level programming models that support efficient software development and execution. Graphs can effectively represent the logical structures of distributed systems and applications so as to facilitate the programming of distributed applications and support efficient mapping of programs to hardware architecture. This chapter presents a Graph-Oriented Programming (GOP) model that provides flexible graph constructs and graph-oriented primitives to build a programming paradigm based on graph topology and also provides a formal specification of software architecture for distributed programs. The GOP model creates an abstract programming framework and supports dynamic reconfiguration of distributed computing system to implement adaptive computation and fault-tolerance. Various computing environments have been developed based on GOP for cluster computing, web service, and component-based computation.