The Orca Parallel Programming Language

Henri E. Bal

Orca is a language for parallel programming on distributed systems, based on the shared data-object model. This model is a simple and portable form of object-based distributed shared memory.

The language has been implemented on the following platforms (on some still in experimental form):

Amoeba 5.0
SunOS 4.1
Solaris 2
Linux
BSDI BSD/OS
CM-5
SP-2
Parix (T800 and PowerXplorer)
Myrinet

Orca is described in the book Programming Distributed Systems and in several published research papers.

Currently available are:

An Orca distribution for Solaris-2, Linux and BSDI BSD/OS.
A binary distribution for Amoeba (Sparc and Intel i80[345]86 version).
Some selected papers on Orca.
The Orca reference manual, on-line as well as in postscript.
The Orca user manual, on-line as well as in postscript.

The Orca research project also focuses on wide area cluster computing, through the Albatross project.

People involved in the Orca project

Faculty Members

Postdocs

Graduate Students

Programmers

Former members

Dr. Koen Langendoen (koen@pds.twi.tudelft.nl)
Dr. Saniya Ben Hassen (saniya@nl.ibm.com)
Raoul Bhoedjang (raoul@cs.cornell.edu)
Dr. Aske Plaat (aske@cs.vu.nl)
Tim Rühl (tim@cs.vu.nl)
Luc Renambot (renambot@cs.vu.nl)
Ronald Veldema (rveldema@cs.vu.nl)

Cooperation

We cooperate intensively with the Globe group of Andrew Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl).
We also cooperate with the group of Frans Kaashoek at MIT (kaashoek@lcs.mit.edu), who is one of the main designers of the Orca system.