Programming the Grid with POP-C ++

Abstract

Despite the fact that Grid computing is the main theme of distributed computing research during the last few years, programming on the Grid is still a huge difficulty to normal users. The POP-C ++ programming system has been built to provide Grid programming facilities which greatly ease the development and the deployment of parallel applications on the Grid. The original parallel object model used in POP-C ++ is a combination of powerful features of object-oriented programming and of high-level distributed programming capabilities. The model is based on the simple idea that objects are suitable structures to encapsulate and to distribute heterogeneous data and computing elements over the Grid. Programmers can guide the resource allocation for each object through the high-level resource descriptions. The object creation process, supported by the POP-C ++ runtime system, is transparent to programmers. Both inter-object and intra-object parallelism are supported through various method invocation semantics. The POP-C ++ programming language extends C ++ to support the parallel object model with just a few new keywords. In this paper, we present the Grid programming aspects of POP-C ++. With POP-C ++, writing a Grid-enabled application becomes as simple as writing a sequential C ++ application. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.