Orchestrating Computations on the World-Wide-Web

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Execution of distributed applications over the Internet involves method invocations on remote objects and coordination tasks. This proposal addresses the task coordination problem by (1) limiting the model of computation to tree structured concurrency, and (2) assuming that there is an environment that provides sacilities for remote method invocation on distributted objects, persistent storage,and computation using standard function library. Tree structured concurrency permits only restricted communications among the tasks: a task may spawn children task and all communications are between parents and their children. It can be shown that such structure communication, though less powerful than interactions in process networks, are sufficient to solve most problems of interest, and they avoid many of the problems associated with concurrency. The broader impact of this research will be to (1) design a theory for restricted class of concurrent computing, which still exhibits the power to solve a variety of task coordination problems, and (2) develop prototype implementations that allow non-programmers to develop with ease distributed applications on the Internet.