HPC (Hierarchial Process Composition): A Model of Structure and Change in Distributed Systems.

Distributed systems must provide certain fundamental facilities including communication, protection, resource management, reliability, and process computation abstraction. Current designs for distributed systems tend to focus on only one of these issues support for multiprocess structures has been especially neglected. The HPC model an object-oriented model of interprocess relationships for distributed systems, addresses all of these fundamental services. The major novelties of HPC lie in the extension of the process abstraction to collections of processes and the provision of a rich set of structuring mechanisms for distributed computations. An important aspect of the model is that it results in the ability to maintain and exploit execution context for managing processes in a distributed computation. This paper describes the HPC model, show how the model can be used to build system-level services, and discuss the implementation of an HPC kernel. Author