Experience With Distributed Programming In Orca

Orca is a language for programming parallel applications on distributed computing systems. Although processors in such systems communicate only through message passing and not through shared memory, Orca provides a communication model based on logically shared data. Programmers can define abstract data types and create instances (objects) of these types, which may be shared among processes. All operations on shared objects are executed atomically. Orca's shared objects are implemented by replicating them in the local memories of the processors. Read operations use the local copies of the object, without doing any interprocess communication. Write operations update all copies using an efficient reliable broadcast protocol. In this paper, we briefly describe the language and its implementation and then report on our experiences in using Orca for three parallel applications: the Traveling Salesman Problem, the All-pairs Shortest Paths problem, and Successive Overrelaxation. These applicat..