Messengers: A Coordination Paradigm for Distributed Computing

Messengers是一个基于自迁移线程原理的分布式编程系统，它以程序的形式携带着自己的身份和行为。这使它们能够在底层计算网络中自由导航，相互通信，并调用本机模式C函数。因此，Messengers是分布式应用程序开发的通用协调范例。它的主要优势是应用程序的动态可组合性，支持任意可扩展应用程序的交互和增量开发，以及利用不同类型的工作站集群的能力。该项目主要在基于个体的模拟的背景下研究这项新技术的能力，即，将应用程序建模为自治个体(例如，物理学中的粒子)的集合，每个个体都有其自己的状态和行为。它通过开发使用子计算的自迁移特性的负载平衡和动态资源利用的新技术来关注性能和可伸缩性问题。

MESSENGERS is a distributed programming system based on the principles of self-migrating threads, which carry their own identity and behavior in the form of programs. This enables them to navigate freely in the underlying computational network, communicate with one another, and invoke native- mode C functions. Thus MESSENGERS is a general coordination paradigm for distributed applications development. Its main advantages are dynamic composability of applications, enabling an interactive and incremental development of arbitrarily extensible applications, and the ability to exploit clusters of heterogeneous workstations. This project investigates the capabilities of this new technology primarily in the context of individual-based simulation, that is, simulation where the application is modeled as a collection of autonomous individuals (e.g. particles in physics), each having its own state and behavior. It focuses on issues of performance and scalability by developing new techniques for load balancing and dynamic resource utilization that exploit the self-migration nature of the subcomputations.