A Distributed Host-Satellite System For List-Processing Programs‡
D. Julian, Michael Davies · INFOR Information Systems and Operational Research · 1980
A system is described which permits a single distributed program to run in a host/satellite computer configuration, using the POP-2 programming language. The application area is vision and scene analysis for Artificial Intelligence research. The system offers a listprocessing capability in each computer, and routines and arbitrary list data-structures can be transported between the two machines. The Implementation is summarized. Encoding methods for data structures are described which permit communication between the two computers running the distributed program. Circular data structures have to be communicated, and a method and encoding system for performing this are presented. The choice between alphanumeric and binary representations is discussed. In this application, an alphanumeric encoding seems to be more appropriate.