Introduction

TACO (Topologies and Collections) is a distributed object platform entirely based on C++ templates. TACO provides a powerful group concept as the basic means for high-level data-parallel programming. Entire distributed objects groups can be created, destroyed, selectively cloned and manipulated by various parallel collective operations. TACO's group concept is based on dynamic distributed data structures where group membership is determined through reachability from a root node that represents the entire group. The group topology is described by means of reusable topology classes and TACO's collective operations are generically implemented following a parallel visitor pattern.