Podc: Paradigm-Oriented Distributed Computing

We describe an environment for distributed computing that uses the concept of well-known paradigms. The main advantage of paradigm-oriented distributed computing (PODC) is that the user only needs to specify application-specific sequential code, while the underlying infrastructure takes care of the parallelization and distribution. The main features of the proposed approach, called PODC, are the following: (1) It is intended for loosely coupled network environments, not specialized multiprocessors; (2) it is based on an infrastructure of mobile agents; (3) it supports programming in C, rather than a functional or special-purpose language, and (4) it provides an interactive graphics interface through which programs are constructed, invoked, and monitored.We discuss five paradigms presently supported in PODC: the bag-of-tasks, branch-and-bound search, genetic programming, finite difference, and individual-based simulation. We demonstrate their use, implementation, and performance within the mobile agent-based PODC environment. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.