THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF VOOM - A PARALLEL VIRTUAL OBJECT ORIENTED MACHINE

The architecture of a highly-parallel general-purpose computer system supporting the Object-Oriented model of computation is presented. The basic features of the architecture are described with the aid of a low-level Virtual Machine, which has served as a basis for hardware implementations. The proposed parallel architecture consists of self-contained computers interconnected through a packet-switching network. Each node is a microcomputer comprising: (a) an execution unit, which provides direct support to the object-oriented style by processing messages; (b) a pre-fetch unit which realizes an early-bind scheme; (c) a memory management unit which is responsible for object management and memory recycling; and (d) a communication unit, which implements inter-node message passing and intra-node scheduling.