On interprocess interaction in distributed architectures
Nenad Marovac · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News · 1983
Computational concurrency has been with us for some time and is here to stay, particularly in the domain of distributed systems and fault-tolerant computers. Processes executing concurrently in such systems communicate in order to exchange information and to synchronize the activities they perform. Classical interprocess synchronization mechanisms, based on shared variables and semaphores, are neither efficient nor methodically sound; nor do they produce correct solutions when dealing with autonomous processes running on different processors.The purpose of this paper is to define the problem, submit the arguments against using shared variables and semaphores for interprocess synchronization in distributed systems, and to present a mechanism for handling interprocess interaction in such systems.