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Denton Project Home Page
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University
of Bath

Computing Group
School of Mathematical Sciences


Denton Project

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The Denton Project began life with the aim of using Time-Warp technology in object-oriented discrete event simulation...it turned into a more general investigation into various aspects of symbolic parallel processing. But we'll get back to simulation real soon now.

Denton I, 1990-94

The first phase, in which we developed, implemented and experimented with the design of EuLisp, finished in 1994. The result was a system called Feel which conforms to about 90% of the EuLisp definition. Other developments have been a parallel object-oriented reimplementation of OPS5, the porting and extension of the Persistent Simulation Environment (originally developed at Berkeley), integration of PVM to support distributed processing, and remote control of a Maspar to support data-parallel processing.

Denton II, 1994-date

The second phase started in October 1994, starting the construction of a Virtual Multicomputer. This is an ephemeral, geographically distributed, persistent multicomputer of available heterogenous computing resources (workstation, shared-memory multiprocessor, distributed memory multiprocessor, array processor). The system supports a virtual processor abstraction to distribute data and tasks across the multicomputer, the actual physical composition of which may change dynamically.

We are using the following kit for our prototype system:

Our objective is to make it straightforward to prototype dynamic distributed symbolic applications using whatever resources are available (probably networked workstations), but so that the developed program can also be run on more exotic hardware at a later stage. The infrastructure for this is being developed in conjunction with David DeRoure at the University of Southampton. Applications are being developed in the framework of the VIM Project, in particular, distributed agent-based systems, such as The Fishmarket Project at IIIA (Bellaterra, nr Barcelona). Since we are few people and our resources are limited, we have concentrated our effort on the parts where we felt it was desireable to build our own tools and re-used publicly available software for everything else. Thus what exists of the virtual multicomputer so far is What makes Youtoo novel is that although code is compiled to bytecodes and and the core of the runtime is a byte-coded virtual machine, in order to support separate compilation, the byte codes are output as C char* objects which can then be compiled with cc, linked with ld and made into libraries with ar. Naturally, this also means fast start-up and no need to load and decode a preserved heap image, as well as making it easy to deliver compiled Lisp applications. Youtoo supports both in-calls and out-calls, the FFI being very similar to that for Ilog Talk, designed by Harley Davis et al. Although EuLisp has a simple thread mechanism to support multi-threaded programming on any system, we have also recently integrated both Solaris Threads and Posix Portable Common Runtime (PPCR) Threads.


Denton Information


Dramatis Personae (Past and Present)


Some important numbers (for us)


Julian Padget: jap@maths.bath.ac.uk