Re: How can two tasks in different processors rendezvous?

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Ron, of course you can distribute tasks in a multi-processor like the
Convex. Other work stations with multi-processor modems (SGI, Sun etc)
also provide this capability, because these are shared memory machines.

The question was whether you can do RV between processors with separate
memory (e.g. separate work stations). 

The answer is conceptually yes, but practically no. It would be possible
to provide a virtual implementation of the conceptually shared address
space, so that for example and plain assignment statement would involve
access to the network to access the referenced variables, but in practice
this is not a reasonable implementation and no one has attempted it.

So the answer to the original question is definitely NO in practice, you
cannot use RV between separate machines. However, the distributed annexe
of Ada 95 definitely gives the capability of separate tasks on separate
machines (actually separate partitions) communicating. Some of you may
have seen the GNAT demo at Tri_Ada, where we were demonstrating a single
program running in a distributed manner on two SGI work stations and
one Sun work station.