| In recent years, distributed computing has received considerable attention in both academia and industry. In particular, the importance of simulating distributed algorithms (for validation and demonstration purposes) is now commonly acknowledged. But the inherent complexity and concurrency of distributed algorithms makes them difficult to simulate. In order to address this problem, the use of computational reflection has been proposed. Given the widespread adoption of the object-oriented paradigm for software development, it follows that the simulation of distributed algorithms should be tackled using a concurrent reflective and object-oriented programming language.;In this dissertation, we investigate this hypothesis. More specifically, we study the relevance of the concurrent reflective object-oriented programming language ABCL/R2 for the simulation of a representative set of distributed algorithms. Our work is three-fold: We first motivate and introduce our set of representative target algorithms. We then justify our choice of ABCL/R2 as the language of implementation. To do so, we survey relevant programming languages and libraries available for object-oriented simulation. But, most importantly, we discuss at length the numerous simulations we have implemented in ABCL/R2. Finally, we conclude by proposing a methodology for the design of simulations of distributed algorithms in a concurrent reflective object-oriented programming language. Our thesis is that this body of work does indeed confirm the relevance and importance of using a concurrent reflective object-oriented programming language for the simulation of distributed algorithms. |
