In distributed programming theory, granularity has been around for a long time. The CSP model is of tiny processes performing tasks and passing data (it helped inspire the Go language); the Actor model has messages passed between multitudes of actors changing internal state; even the lambda calculus is about discrete functions acting on data.
Object-oriented programming has developers reasoning about objects (not virtual machines or disks). And in CORBA, and similar systems, thereâs the concept of an object request broker allowing objects to run and be accessed remotely in a distributed system without knowing details of where or how the object executes.
The theory of computing points away from dedicated machines (virtual or real) and to code and data that run on the Supercloud handling the details of code execution and data locality automatically and efficiently.
