Automatic Distributed Partitioning of Component-Based Applications

Distributed applications provide access to distributed resources including memory, processor cycles, and I/O devices. It is easy to create distributed applications with poor performance, but difficult to create distributed applications with good performance. High-performance distributed applications are difficult to create in large part because the programmer must manually partition and distribute the application to maximize locality and minimize communication. This dissertation asserts that system software, not the programmer, should shoulder the burden of distribution. We identify the features necessary to automatically partition and distribute applications. These features include structural metadata to identify and isolate application components, support for component location transparency, dynamic metadata to quantify inter-component communication, an algorithm to choose a distribution, mechanisms to realize a chosen distribution, and sufficient component granularity in the application to enable partitioning. We demonstrate that a large class of applications can be distributed efficiently without access to source code using automatic partitioning tools that minimize distributed communication. This dissertation describes a functional system, Coign, that automatically distributes applications conforming to Microsoft Corporation's Component Object Model (COM). Coign has been applied to several commercial applications, including the Microsoft Picture It! image processor. To our knowledge, Coign is the first system to provide automatic distributed partitioning of binary applications.