Communication in distributed computing environments

Computing is often viewed as a tool and a computing system is typically treated as a toolbox of applications for performing operations such as calculations and data storage and transfer. Currently, humans develop these application tools and apply, or specify how to apply, them. Recognizing that computing is a fundamental discipline challenges us to accept the notion that a computing system could play other roles than merely serving as a toolbox. An active player will require massive parallelism and mechanisms for abstracting over interactions.<>