Orion: A distributed text retrieval system

Computer networks are providing users ready access to more programs and data than ever before. Distributed programs facilitate this trend by allowing complicated programs and large bodies of information to be spread out over multiple machines. But programming the network side of such distributed systems is often a larger problem than the algorithm for the application itself. In this paper I introduce a new communication protocol and library to be used in distributed programming. The new system is being written by Mark Salem in the object-oriented language C++ in an attempt to hide the network details from the programmer. This package should allow me to learn and program on the network much quicker than otherwise. Because the library is being developed simultaneously, I have also served as the devil's advocate in its evolution. The program I implemented is a simple text retrieval system. The key to my project was to take a relatively simple application and show that adding network functionality wouldn't be more of a headache than the program itself. My experience throughout the year has shown that Mark Salem's system achieves this goal.