Refine
Year of publication
- 1999 (2)
Document Type
- Preprint (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Causal Ordering (1)
- Causality (1)
- Distributed Computation (1)
- Distributed Deb (1)
- Distributed System (1)
- Global Predicate Detection (1)
- Logical Time (1)
- Vector Time (1)
Faculty / Organisational entity
The paper shows that characterizing the causal relationship between significant events is an important but non-trivial aspect for understanding the behavior of distributed programs. An introduction to the notion of causality and its relation to logical time is given; some fundamental results concerning the characterization of causality are pre- sented. Recent work on the detection of causal relationships in distributed computations is surveyed. The relative merits and limitations of the different approaches are discussed, and their general feasibility is analyzed.
Distributed systems are an alternative to shared-memorymultiprocessors for the execution of parallel applications.PANDA is a runtime system which provides architecturalsupport for efficient parallel and distributed program-ming. PANDA supplies means for fast user-level threads,and for a transparent and coordinated sharing of objectsacross a homogeneous network. The paper motivates themajor architectural choices that guided our design. Theproblem of sharing data in a distributed environment isdiscussed, and the performance of appropriate mecha-nisms provided by the PANDA prototype implementation isassessed.