On the adequate support of communication interfaces in distributed systems

Abstract

Existing experimental distributed systems usually support a single mechanism for message-based communication. It is argued that different needs at the operating system level and at the application level make it highly desirable to support several, possibly incompatible communication interfaces in the same distributed system.The resulting problems are investigated and appropriate architectural solutions are proposed. As an example we demonstrate how the two different distributed languages LADY and CSSA with their distinct communication models are implemented in the INCAS project and discuss some problems encountered during the system design.