Distributed process groups in the V Kernel

  • Authors:
  • David R. Cheriton;Willy Zwaenepoel

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Science Department, EECS Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Computer Science Department, Rice University, Houston, TX

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
  • Year:
  • 1985

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Abstract

The V kernel supports an abstraction of processes, with operations for interprocess communication, process management, and memory management. This abstraction is used as a software base for constructing distributed systems. As a distributed kernel, the V kernel makes intermachine boundaries largely transparent.In this environment of many cooperating processes on different machines, there are many logical groups of processes. Examples include the group of tile servers, a group of processes executing a particular job, and a group of processes executing a distributed parallel computation.In this paper we describe the extension of the V kernel to support process groups. Operations on groups include group interprocess communication, which provides an application-level abstraction of network multicast. Aspects of the implementation and performance, and initial experience with applications are discussed.