Mentat: An Object-Oriented Macro Data Flow System

Abstract

Mentat, an object-oriented macro data flow system designed to facilitate parallelism in distributed systems, is presented.The macro data flow model is a model of computation similar to the data flow model with two principle differences: the computational complexity of the actors is much greater than in traditional data flow systems, and there are persistent actors that maintain state information between executions.Mentat is a system that combines the object-oriented programming paradigm and the macro data flow model of computation.Mentat programs use a dynamic structure called a future list to represent the future of computations.