A Capabilities Based Communication Model for High-Performance Distributed Applications: The Open HPC++ Approach

Typical high-performance distributed applications consist of clients accessing computational and information resources implemented by remote servers. Different clients may have different requirements for accessing a single server resource. A server resource may also want to provide different kinds of accesses for different clients, depending on factors such as the amount of trust between the server and a client. The requirements or attributes of remote accesses can be encapsulated under the concept of remote access capabilities. Capabilities can be used to model remote access attributes such as: data compression (or encryption) for arguments and return value, client authentication, and giving access to a subset of the server's interface. This paper presents a capabilities based model of communication and describes how it is implemented in a prototype programming environment called Open HPC++. In Open HPC++, capabilities are associated with a remote reference and thus determine the kind..