Partitioning Ada programs for execution on distributed systems

Abstract

The goal of Honeywell's Distributed Ada project is to develop an approach where a distributed system appears to the application program as one high performance, fault tolerant and extensible Ada virtual machine. This approach simplifies the application software design since the design need not contain information about the underlying distributed configuration. Responsibility for synchronization of the application software is shifted from the application program to the virtual machine. Our project has three main thrusts: definition of a notation for expressing the partitioning of the application program onto the distributed system (the focus of this paper), a compiler which generates code appropriate for a given application program and partitioning specification, and a distributed Ada runtime system.