Exploiting parallelism in the implementation of AGNA, a persistent programming system

A design for AGNA, a persistent object system that utilizes parallelism in a fundamental way to enhance performance, is presented. The underlying thesis is that fine-grained parallelism is essential for achieving scalable performance on parallel multiple instruction/multiple data (MIMD) machines. This, in turn, implies a data-driven model of computation for efficiency. The complete design based on these principles starts with a declarative source language because such languages reveal the most fine-grained parallelism. It is described how transactions are compiled into an abstract, fine-grained parallel machine called P-RISC. The P-RISC virtual heap is implemented in the memory and disk of a parallel machine in such a way that paging is overlapped with useful computation. The current implementation status is described, some preliminary performance results are reported and the approach presented is compared to several recent parallel database system projects