DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS I-- Message Passing Environments

In distributed memory concurrent computing, the ongoing challenge has been to optimally mate complex applications and complex hardware to achieve optimal use of resources. Traditionally, two metrics to assess success have been used. These are absolute performance, and performance per unit machine cost. One overlooked metric is the cost of software development and maintenance. This measure is strongly affected by the programming paradigm. Over the years there have been a number of proposed paradigms. They are parallel languages, coordination languages, language extensions, shared objects, and virtual shared memory. The most widely used paradigm for distributed memory systems has been message passing. The issues of control/communication strategy and its implementation, is a major hurtle to be overcome before the benefits of distributed computing can be employed. It is the goal of this research to create a Distributed Applications Builder (DAB), which will aid the distributed systems ’ user by hiding the control/communications aspects under a higher level of abstraction. This framework must produce multiprocess coordination mechanisms with which the end-user can operate. As a step towards the development of DAB and its communication foundation, this report focuses on the message passing paradigm for distributed memory computing. This is not an exhaustive list of existing systems, but is representative of message passing systems and their evolution over the years. The report discusses the progression of message passin