🚀 go-pugleaf

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS SEMINAR

                    -Friday, November 13, 1992

Professor and Dr. J. Schaeffer, Dept. Comp. Sci., Univ.
of  Alberta,  will  speak on "Enterprise: A Programming
Environment for Developing Distributed Applications".

TIME:                 10:30-11:30 a.m.

ROOM:                 DC 1302

ABSTRACT

Workstation environments have been in use for more than
a   decade   now.   Although  a network of workstations
together   represents   considerable  computing  power,
single  users   often  cannot   utilize  this power for
their  applications.   By  combining  the  resources
available  on  a  network,   the   user   can  create a
supercomputer  that  is  flexible  to the user's needs,
expandable   as   more   resources  are  required,  and
adaptable     to    the       changing      technology.
Unfortunately,    writing parallel/distributed software
is  often  perceived  as  a  complicated endeavor.  A
tool  is  needed to bridge the perceived complexity gap
between distributed and sequential software.

Enterprise is a programming environment for  designing,
coding,  debugging,  testing, monitoring, profiling and
executing   programs   in   a  distributed  hardware
environment.   Enterprise   code  looks  like  familiar
sequential   code;   the   parallelism   is   expressed
graphically.   High-level parallelization  techniques
are   represented   by  different  graphical icons.  By
manipulating  icons,  the user  can  quickly  alter the
parallelization   in   the   program,  usually  without
changing  the  source  code.   The system automatically
inserts  the   code  necessary to handle communication,
synchronization and fault tolerance, allowing the rapid
construction  of   correct   distributed   programs.
This bridges the complexity gap between distributed and
sequential    software.     Enterprise   supports  load
balancing,  limited process migration, and dynamic dis-
tribution  of  work  in   environments   with  changing
resource utilization.