Re: Ada using the Internet for multi-tasking

[madmats@elcgl.epfl.ch]

In article <366@platypus.uofs.edu>, cml8@robin.cs.uofs.edu (Chris M. Little) writes:
> 
> I was discussing with a friend the possibility of a single Ada program spawning
> its tasks over many hosts on the Internet or any other network or subnet.  We
> have about 30 Sun 4 Workstations in our department.  I have an account on all
> of them.  If I had a huge Ada program which utilized multi-tasking, I would
> like for the workload to be shared by all of them, and not just one.  Has
> anyone else entertained this concept and/or does anyone know of an Ada package
> that might support this?  Any insight on the issue would be welcome.
> 

I have developped an Ada package called Distributor that enables execution of
distributed Ada applications on a DECnet network. I intend to port this package
to UNIX/internet by the end of this year.

Of course, several instances of an Ada program have to run and make up a
distributed application (actually distributing tasks over such a network would
not be feasible because of data shared by tasks and access types among others.
Moreover, it would require modifying an Ada compiler or run time system).

The communication is based on message passing between processes, but more
elaborate communication protocols may be built by extending the package.

If anyone is interested, I have a draft of the paper that I intend to publish
some day on this topic, and I would be glad to have anyone's comments.


Mats Weber
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
EPFL DI LGL
1015 Lausanne
Switzerland

E-mail : madmats@elcgl.epfl.ch
phone  : +41 21 693 52 92
fax    : +41 21 693 39 09