Reliability issues in the design of distributed object-based architectures

Abstract

This thesis is aimed at enhancing the existing set of techniques for building distributed systems, specifically from the point of view of fault-tolerant com- puting. Reliability is of fundamental importance in the design and operation of dis- tributed systems, as an increasing number of computers are employed in the automation of various essential services. In the past decade, much research effort has been concerned with the object-based methodology for the design and implementation of reliable distributed systems. This thesis describes three contributions to this effort. First, it is shown that object-based programming features can in fact be introduced into pro- cedural languages provided that these languages are endowed with certain facilities. Then, work is discussed which illustrates the relationship between distributed object-based architectures and an apparently different form of distributed architectures based on processes. This work puts the notion of object-based architectures into a new perspective, which shows that the object-based philosophy and the process-based philosophy are the dual of each other. Finally, an important aspect of the design of an object-based distributed architecture is investigated, that of automatic garbage collection. A distri- buted garbage collection scheme is described that handles fault tolerance by an extension of the technique commonly employed to detect unwanted com- putations in distributed architectures. The scheme proposed can also be seen as yet a further illustration of the link between object-based and process-based architectures.