Distributed and communicating objects are becoming ubiquitous. In global, Grid and Peer-to-Peer computing environments, extensive use is made of objects interacting through method calls. So far, no general formalism has been proposed for the foundation of such systems.

Caromel and Henrio are the first to define a calculus for distributed objects interacting using asynchronous method calls with generalized futures, i.e., wait-by-necessity -- a must in large-scale systems, providing both high structuring and low coupling, and thus scalability. The authors provide very generic results on expressiveness and determinism, and the potential of their approach is further demonstrated by its capacity to cope with advanced issues such as mobility, groups, and components.

Researchers and graduate students will find here an extensive review of concurrent languages and calculi, with comprehensive figures and summaries.

Developers of distributed systems can adopt the many implementation strategies that are presented and analyzed in detail.

Preface by Luca Cardelli

Offers an extensive review of concurrent languages and calculi, with comprehensive figures and summaries.
Presents and analyses many implementation strategies that can readily be used by developers of distributed systems.

This volume contains the Proceedings of the International Symposium on C- puting in Object-Oriented Parallel Environments (ISCOPE '98), held at Santa 1 Fe, New Mexico, USA on December 8{11, 1998. ISCOPE is in its second year, and continues to grow both in attendance and in the diversity of the subjects covered. ISCOPE'97 and its predecessor conferences focused more narrowly on scienti c computing in the high-performance arena. ISCOPE '98 retains this emphasis, but has broadened to include discrete-event simulation, mobile c- puting, and web-based metacomputing. The ISCOPE '98 Program Committee received 39 submissions, and acc- ted 10 (26%) as Regular Papers, based on their excellent content, maturity of development, and likelihood for widespread interest. These 10 are divided into three technical categories. Applications: The rst paper describes an approach to simulating advanced nuclear power reactor designs that incorporates multiple local solution - thods and a natural extension to parallel execution. The second paper disc- ses a Time Warp simulation kernel that is highly con gurable and portable. The third gives an account of the development of software for simulating high-intensity charged particle beams in linear particle accelerators, based on the POOMA framework, that shows performance considerably better than an HPF version, along with good parallel speedup.