Contributions of thesis

Some of the work reported here has appeared earlier in the literature [39,38,47,41,12,11]. The main contributions of this thesis are:

• Demonstration of the effectiveness of message-driven parallel runtime system in seamlessly supporting the coexistence of multiple software modules, possibly based on different programming paradigms.

• An interface model that encourages modular development of applications yet allows tighter integration of application components at run time.

• Mechanisms that allow clear expression of control-flow within software modules without sacrificing efficiency, in the presence of a message-driven runtime system.

• Migration path for existing parallel applications to simplify conversion to the new component architecture.