Article

Free access

Limitations of synchronous communication with static process structure in languages for distributed computing

Authors:

Barbara Liskov,

Maurice Herlihy,

Lucy GilbertAuthors Info & Claims

POPL '86: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages

Pages 150 - 159

https://doi.org/10.1145/512644.512658

Published: 01 January 1986 Publication History

Abstract

Modules in a distributed program are active, communicating entities. A language for distributed programs must choose a set of communication primitives and a structure for processes. This paper examines one possible choice: synchronous communication primitives (such as rendez-vous or remote procedure call) in combination with modules that encompass a fixed number of processes (such as Ada tasks or UNIX processes). An analysis of the concurrency requirements of distributed programs suggests that this combination imposes complex and indirect solutions to common problems and thus is poorly suited for applications such as distributed programs in which concurrency is important. To provide adequate expressive power, a language for distributed programs should abandon either synchronous communication primitives or the static process structure.

References

[1]

Andrews, G. R. "Synchronizing Resources". ACM Trans. on Programming Lang. and Systems 3, 4 (October 1981), 405--430.

Digital Library

[2]

Birrel A. D., and Nelson, B. J. "Implementing Remote Procedure Calls". ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2, 1 (Feb. 1984), 39--59.

Digital Library

[3]

Birrel, A. D., Levin, R., Needham, R., and Schroeder, M. "Grapevine: an Exercise in Distributed Computing". Comm. ACM 25, 14 (April 1982), 260--274.

Digital Library

[4]

Bloom, T. Evaluating Synchronization Mechanisms. Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, ACM-SIGOPS, December, 1979.

Digital Library

[5]

Brinch Hansen, P. "Distributed processes: A concurrent programming concept". Comm. ACM 21, 11 (November 1978), 934--941.

Digital Library

[6]

Cook, R. P. "Starmod- a language for distributed programming". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 6, 6 (November 1980), 563--571.

[7]

Dept. of Defense. Reference manual for the ADA programming language. ANSI/MIL-STD-1815A-1983.

Digital Library

[8]

Feldman, J. A. "High Level Programming for Distributed Computing". Comm. ACM 22, 6 (June 1979), 353--368.

Digital Library

[9]

Gehani, N. "Concurrency in Ada and Multicomputers". Computer Languages 7, 2 (1982).

Digital Library

[10]

Gehani, Narain. Ada: an advanced introduction. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1984.

Digital Library

[11]

Haddon, B. K. "Nested monitor calls". ACM Operating Systems Review 11, 4 (October 1977), 18--23.

Digital Library

[12]

Hoare, C.A.R. "Monitors: an operating system structuring concept". Comm. ACM 17, 10 (October 1974), 549--557.

Digital Library

[13]

Hoare, C.A.R. "Communicating sequential processes". Comm. ACM 21, 8 (August 1978), 666--677.

Digital Library

[14]

Ichbiah, J. et al. "Rationale for the design of the Ada programming language". SIGPLAN Notices 14, 6 (June 1979).

Digital Library

[15]

Knight, J. C. and Urquhart, J. I. A. "On the implementation and use of Ada on fault-tolerant distributed systems". Ada Letters 4, 3 (Nov. 1984).

Digital Library

[16]

Lauer, P. E., and Needham, R. M. On the duality of operating systems structures. Proc. Second International Symposium on Operating Systems Structures, October, 1978. Reprinted in Operating Systems Review, 13(2) April 1979, pp. 3--19.

Digital Library

[17]

B. Liskov and M. Herlihy. Issues in Process and Communication Structure for Distributed Programs. Proceedings of the Third IEEE Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems, October, 1983.

[18]

Liskov, B., and Scheifler, R. "Guardians and actions: linguistic support for robust, distributed programs". ACM Trans. on Programming Lang. and Systems 5, 3 (July 1983), 381--404.

Digital Library

[19]

Lister, A. "The problem of nested monitor calls". ACM Operating Systems Review 11. 2 (July 1977), 5--7.

Digital Library

[20]

Mitchell, J., G., Maybury, W., and Sweet, R. Mesa language manual, version 5.0. CSL-79-3, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, April, 1979.

[21]

Nelson, B. Remote Procedure Call. CMU-CS-81-119, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1981. Ph.D. Thesis.

Digital Library

[22]

Rashid, R. An inter-process communication facility for Unix. CMU-CS-81-124, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1980.

[23]

Schuman, S. A., Clarke, E. M., Nikolaou, C. N. Programming Distributed Applications in Ada: a First Approach. Proceedings of the 1981 Conference on Parallel Processing, Aug., 1981.

[24]

Segall, Z. and Rudolph, L. PIE - a programming and instrumentation environment for parallel processing. CMU-CS-85-128, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1985.

[25]

Wegner, P. and Smolka, S. "Processes, tasks, and monitors: a comparative study of concurrent programming primitives". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 9, 4 (July 1983), 39--59.

[26]

Welsh, J., and Lister, A. "A comparative Study of Task Communication in Ada". Software - Practice and Experience 11 (1981), 257--290.

[27]

Yemini, S. On the suitability of Ada multitasking for expressing parallel algorithms. Proceedings of AdaTEC Conference on Ada, Oct., 1982.

Digital Library

Cited By

Olsson RKeen A(2015)User accessible reply capabilities in invoking and servicing operationsConcurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience10.1002/cpe.353127:17(5134-5155)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/cpe.3531
Olsson RKeen AWilliamson T(2015)Transformations for early reply and forward message passing mechanismsConcurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience10.1002/cpe.344827:17(4645-4658)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/cpe.3448
Wybranietz DBuhler P(2005)The lady programming environment for distributed operating systemsPARLE '89 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe10.1007/3540512845_35(100-117)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2005
https://doi.org/10.1007/3540512845_35
Show More Cited By

Limitations of synchronous communication with static process structure in languages for distributed computing
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures

Recommendations

Multicast communication in distributed algorithms (networks, distributed languages)
Programming languages for distributed computing systems

When distributed systems first appeared, they were programmed in traditional sequential languages, usually with the addition of a few library procedures for sending and receiving messages. As distributed applications became more commonplace and more ...
Synchronous, asynchronous, and causally ordered communication
Summary
This article studies characteristic properties of synchronous and asynchronous message communications in distributed systems. Based on the causality relation between events in computations with asynchronous communications, we characterize ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

POPL '86: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages

January 1986

326 pages

ISBN:9781450373470

DOI:10.1145/512644

Copyright © 1986 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 January 1986

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 824 of 4,130 submissions, 20%

Upcoming Conference

POPL '25

Sponsor:
sigplan

The 52nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

January 19 - 25, 2025

Denver , CO , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

24
Total Citations
View Citations
380
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)57
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)21

Reflects downloads up to 21 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Olsson RKeen A(2015)User accessible reply capabilities in invoking and servicing operationsConcurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience10.1002/cpe.353127:17(5134-5155)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/cpe.3531
Olsson RKeen AWilliamson T(2015)Transformations for early reply and forward message passing mechanismsConcurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience10.1002/cpe.344827:17(4645-4658)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/cpe.3448
Wybranietz DBuhler P(2005)The lady programming environment for distributed operating systemsPARLE '89 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe10.1007/3540512845_35(100-117)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2005
https://doi.org/10.1007/3540512845_35
Saleh HGautron P(2005)A concurrency control mechanism for C++ objectsObject-Based Concurrent Computing10.1007/3-540-55613-3_10(195-210)Online publication date: 27-May-2005
https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55613-3_10
Sami YVidal-Naquet G(2005)Formalisation of the behavior of actors by colored Petri nets and some applicationsPARLE '91 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe10.1007/3-540-54152-7_61(110-127)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2005
https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-54152-7_61
Plewan HSchlenk P(2005)Creating and controlling concurrency in object oriented systems — A case study —CONPAR 90 — VAPP IV10.1007/3-540-53065-7_138(616-627)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2005
https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-53065-7_138
Keen AGe TMaris JOlsson R(2004)JRACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/982158.98216226:3(578-608)Online publication date: 1-May-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/982158.982162
(2001)JRProceedings of the The 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems10.5555/876878.879254Online publication date: 16-Apr-2001
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/876878.879254
Kiddle OWellings A(1998)Extensible protected typesACM SIGAda Ada Letters10.1145/301687.289629XVIII:6(229-239)Online publication date: 1-Nov-1998
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/301687.289629
Kiddle OWellings ASeidewitz EThomas WFeldman M(1998)Extensible protected typesProceedings of the 1998 annual ACM SIGAda international conference on Ada10.1145/289524.289629(229-239)Online publication date: 1-Nov-1998
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/289524.289629
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents