A design for a fault-tolerant, distributed implementation of Linda

Abstract

A distributed implementation of a parallel system is of interest because it can provide an economical source of concurrency, can be scaled easily to match the needs of particular computations, and can be fault-tolerant. A design is described for such an implementation for the Linda parallel programming system, in which processes share a memory called the tuple space. Fault tolerance is achieved by replication: by having more than one copy of the tuple space, some replicas can provide information when others are not accessible due to failures. The replication technique takes advantage of the semantics of Linda so that processes encounter little delay in accessing the tuple space. In addition to providing an efficient implementation for Linda, the study extends work on replication techniques by showing what can be done when semantics are taken into account.<>