DISTRIBUTED PROCESS CREATION WITHIN A SHARED DATA SPACE FRAMEWORK

This paper describes the design and implementation of a remote process instantiation mechanism which is consistent with the Linda paradigm a nd semantics of the EVAL operation, and which uses shared data space a s the medium for passing process and environment parameters. The motiv ation for such an implementation stems from our effort to rehost a uni processor version of the Linda computational system to a network of wo rkstations. The baseline version of the Linda system relies on the sem antics of the UNIX fork () system call to create processes and to pass the proper execution parameters to them. In creating a distributed ve rsion of the Linda environment, two major issues are addressed: (1) ho w to instantiate a remote process that knows where, among several poss ibilities, to begin its execution, and (2) how to communicate the prop er run-time values of relevant variables to each new remote Linda proc ess. Guiding our implementation was a desire to employ existing interp rocess communication facilities, i.e. shared data space, to pass proce ss creation and execution parameters.