Distributed process groups in the V Kernel

David R. Cheriton, Willy Zwaenepoel
1985 ACM Transactions on Computer Systems  
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
more » ... ting 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.
doi:10.1145/214438.214439 fatcat:7di35ut2hrdlpovhqopctb5eae