The Distributed Object-Oriented Threads System DOTS

We describe the design and implementation of the Distributed Object-Oriented Threads System (DOTS). This system is a complete redesign of the Distributed Threads System (DTS) using the object-oriented paradigm both in its internal implementation and in the programming paradigm it supports. DOTS extends the support for fork/join parallel programming from shared memory threads to a distributed environment. It is currently implemented on top of the Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE). A heterogeneous network of Windows NT PC's and of UNIX workstations is transformed by DOTS into a homogeneous pool of anonymous compute servers. DOTS has been used recently in applications from computer graphics and computational number theory. We also discuss the performance characteristics of DOTS for a workstation cluster running under Solaris and a PC network using Windows NT, as they were obtained from a prototypical example.