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% Revision 1.1  90/05/04  10:41:01  lwvanels
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%% The text of your abstract and nothing else (other than comments) goes here.
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Is it possible to construct a heterogeneous distributed computing
architecture capable of solving interesting complex problems?  Can we
easily use this architecture to maintain a detailed history or
provenance of the data processed by it?  Most existing distributed
architectures can perform only one operation at a time.  While they
are capable of tracing possession of data, these architectures do not
always track the network of operations used to synthesize new data.

This thesis presents a distributed implementation of data propagation,
a computational model that provides for concurrent processing that is
not constrained to a single distributed operation.  This system is
capable of distributing computation across a heterogeneous network.
It allows for the division of multiple simultaneous operations in a
single distributed system.  I also identify four constraints that may
be placed on general-purpose data propagation to allow for
deterministic computation in such a distributed propagation network.

This thesis also presents an application of distributed propagation by
illustrating how a generic transformation may be applied to existing
propagator networks to allow for the maintenance of data provenance.
I show that the modular structure of data propagation permits the
simple modification of a propagator network design to maintain the
histories of data.
