Thor: A Distributed Object-Oriented Database System

Thor is a large-scale distributed, object-oriented database system that provides reliable and highly available persistent storage for objects.

Selected Publications

+ Providing Persistent Objects in Distributed Systems
+ HAC: Hybrid Adaptive Caching for Distributed Storage Systems
+ Lazy Consistency Using Loosely Synchronized Clocks
+ Collecting Distributed Garbage Cycles by Back Tracing
+ The Modified Object Buffer: A Stroage Management Technique for Object-Oriented Databases
+ JPS: A Distributed Persistent Java System

References

+ Thor User Guide

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Thor makes future applications substantially easier to build by providing a high-level platform for application development. Application programmers need not to be concerned with distribution, caching, disk management, and can focus on providing application services to users. Thor allows application programmers to use their preferred programming language and even to develop applications using a variety of programming languages; the components in the different languages will be able to inter-operate by sharing objects in Thor.

Research Topics

+ Byzantine Fault Tolerant Replication
+ Object Specification and Implementation
+ Efficient Type Safe Sharing
+ Large-Scale Caching with Fine-Grained Sharing
+ Disk Storage Management for Small Objects
+ Collecting a Distributed Transactional Object Heap
+ Fast Replicated Servers
+ Persistent Programming in Java

The objects in Thor are specified and implemented in Theta, a new programming language developed by the Programming Methodology Group.

For more info please contact webmaster@pmg.lcs.mit.edu. Last updated: October 4, 2002.