This is a project to build a tool-based software laboratory to facilitate experimental research in distributed and parallel computing. The laboratory has three major components: a collection of high-level tools to aid in the development of distributed and parallel algorithms, a programming language workbench, and a configurable operating system kernel. The long term goal is to use the laboratory as a vehicle for addressing several problems fundamental to the design and use of distributed and parallel systems. These problems range from implementing parallel algorithms that exploit alternative architectures, to understanding the principles of interprocess communication and synchronization across a wide spectrum of architectures, to designing system software that exploits the heterogeneity and redundancy inherent in distributed and parallel architectures. In addition to this long term goal, designing and implementing the laboratory will allow investigation of two complementary issues. First, the problem of building powerful and efficient tools is interesting and challenging research in its own right. Each tool must be general enough to support a wide range of applications and at the same time must be efficiently implementable on a wide spectrum of underlying architectures. Second, the breadth of the laboratory will allow study of the interaction between system components. In particular, how high-level tools for designing parallel algorithms depend on the language support systems, and how these systems, in turn, depend on the communication support provided by the kernel.
