Diploma Thesis, TU-Vienna, 2011

An eXtensible Virtual Shared Memory (XVSM) provides a shared data space for the communication and collaboration of several processes, and generally, an XVSM core holds one XVSM space. Several containers are incorporated in an XVSM space. A container holds the data objects called entries, that are used for coordination purposes. Through different coordination mechanisms, a user can access, store or delete entries of a container. Furthermore, for extensibility purposes aspect-oriented programming has been integrated in XVSM.

 

Due to the distribution of the XVSM cores in a network, the team of the Space Based Computing Group of the Vienna University of Technology is interested in a simple way to configure and visualise the configuration of these cores. A method for monitoring the cores should be integrated in addition.

 

In the prototype underlying this paper the XVSM-Editor has been introduced. One may create an XVSM core configuration inside this editor through simply dragging and dropping the items from the palette to the canvas or through retrieving an existing configuration from a remote XVSM core. In the latter case, one can of course adapt the configuration. The XVSM-Editor displays the values of the fields inside a container, coordinator, aspect, or a simple class, and in addition, the values may be changed. Through this XVSM-Editor one can deploy an XVSM core configuration to one several XVSM cores. Furthermore, the XVSM-Editor provides a simple monitoring functionality. In addition, the XVSM-Editor provides an approach to fulfill the extensibility of XVSM. It has become possible to visualize aspects or coordinators that are unknown yet. The developed prototype has been created by means of the combined result of the comparison of related work and literature reviews.

 

By dint of the XVSM-Editor, it is easier to obtain a configuration of an existing XVSM core, possibly change it, and afterwards deploy this configuration to several XVSM cores. Finally, the creation process of the configuration is less error-prone, because the user can only create or edit the components of the XVSM cores through given features. The benefit of this solution is that it fosters both, the visualization and the deployment of the configuration in a simple way.