Portability events: A programming model for scalable system infrastructures

Abstract

Clustered Objects (COs) [1] have been proven to be an effective abstraction for improving scalability of systems software [2, 3]. But can we devise a programming model that would allow COs to live outside the specialized environments of these operating systems and still provide benefit? This paper presents an overview of SCOPE (Scalable COs with Portability Events), a prototype userlevel library derived from the original implementation of COs in the K42 OS. Our initial results indicate that not only do the benefits of COs hold, but that the notion of a "portability event", responsible for maintaining the runtime environment of COs, provides a powerful programming model that will enable COs to be seamlessly transplanted into systems beyond K42. This paper overviews this programming model, provides details and preliminary results from its prototype implementation in SCOPE, and provides motivation to consider simple language mechanisms to further support portability events and this programming model in general. Copyright © 2006 ACM.