To appear at (HIPS'99), San Juan, Puerto Rico, USA, April 12, 1999
Abstract
(This submission is for the "short paper" category. This work hasn't
appeared in or been submitted to any other conference or workshop.)
Many existing systems (e.g., CORBA, Java RMI) contain mechanisms for
performing distributed communication among different, remote programs.
Unfortunately, these mechanisms are complicated and not
straightforward to use.
This paper presents an alternative approach to this problem.
Synchronizing Interoperable Resources (SIR) extends the communication
mechanisms (rendezvous, asynchronous message passing, RPC) in the SR
concurrent programming language. Although SIR does not provide the
full functionality of, say, CORBA, it does provide more flexible
inter-program communication.
SIR's expressive communication allows the programmer to work at a high
conceptual level, without getting bogged down in the many details of
other approaches. The SIR extensions to the SR programming model and
its implementation are minor. SIR also facilitates rapid prototype
development.
This paper presents an overview of the design and implementation of
SIR, including the requirements and interactions of the SIR compiler
and run-time support system. It presents some promising preliminary
performance results; it also discusses trade-offs with other
approaches and some of the other issues that have arisen so far in
this work.
