Abstract: In sequential object oriented languages such as C++, a mechanism is provided to permit multiple asynchronous processing operations without compiler modifications, language extensions or special pre-processing. A specially adapted pointer converts a procedure call into an asynchronous task thread, while returning an expected response to permit a calling program to continue processing. The returned value can be either discarded or converted to a future variable if the calling program requires the result of the separate processing on the asynchronous thread. The invention can be used in parallel multi-processors environments and in uni-processors having parallel processing characteristics.

Abstract: A mechanism and method for accessing remote data objects in a distributed memory environment is disclosed. In the distributed memory environment, a number of parallel processors are remote from each other and each has memory storage capacity with parallel address locations. For each data object stored in the local memory of a processor, that processor stores a variable at a specific location pointing to the address of the data object in its local memory. At the same (parallel) location in the local memories of all remote parallel processors, a variable pointing to the home processor for the data object is stored. In order to access the data object, it is only necessary to locate the identifier variable in the processor processing a program pointing to the processor having the data object in storage.