UC++ Project

Summary

UC++ is an extension of C++, incorporating in an integral way active objects, which allows the language to be used for building parallel systems.

Work is currently under way on UC++-2, a complete reimplementation of the system avoiding all language extensions, making use of the Europa level 0 interface . It is hoped that a public release of UC++2 will take place at the start of August 1996. For further details of the implementation of UC++-2 and progress reports contact russel@dcs.kcl.ac.uk

Features of UC++-2 include:

allows use of any standard C++ compiler
allows semi-transparent distribution of C++ objects on heterogenous networks
introduces the idea of a generated library: this is used like a standard Unix library, except that parts of the library are generated dynamically from the user code
supports the Europa level 0 interface to allow modification of active object behaviour through inheritance, without requiring any changes to the UC++ generated libraries. In the future this should also allow interoperability with third party libraries that conform to the interface.
message passing implemented on top of PVM, with support for MPI and multithreaded objects using pthreads to follow (probably not in release 2.0).

The current version of the UC++2.0 manual (which is always in draft form!) can be found by clicking here

Information on previous version:

The People

The people involved are:

This project is currently running as a collaboration between the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL) and The London Parallel Applications Centre (LPAC) with financial support from the EPSRC (Grant number GR/J82423).

A previous phase of the project had been a collaboration between UCL and ICL plc, under the auspices of LPAC with financial support under the UK DTI PAP, project number IED3/9591/015-CTA8.

The London Parallel Application Centre (LPAC)