Subject: Re: CCL:What exactly is LINDA

From: Gerald Loeffler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 00:34:55 +0100

Hi!

Linda is an implementation of the (by now almost classical) concept of
tuple-space, which is quite similar to a message-board that is shared by
otherwise completely independent processes. These processes can leave
messages (data) at the message-board and collect messages (data) from
the message-board. The tuple-space is thus a communication mechanism for
distributed and/or parallel computing.

In principle you should be able to implement a tuple-space on top of
different inter-process communication mechanisms like sockets, MPI, etc.
I don't know what Linda itself uses - but it really doesn't matter
because you are shielded from this.

Hoping that I'm not being unfair, I'd say that any concept (like that of
a shared message-board) that uses a single, shared resource doesn't
scale well with the number of processes trying to access this shared
resource. Hence I'd guess that you get a very intuitive programming
model at the expense of limited scalability.

This whole idea quite recently came to new fame with a Java
implementation (Jini / JavaSpaces).

	cheers,
	gerald

[email-masked] wrote:
> 
> What (exactly) is LINDA? Is it (merely) a message-passing library
> a la PVM or MPI with a user-interface simulating a virtual shared
> memory? What are you really paying for if you buy LINDA?
> 
> LINDA is known to me only in the context of parallel GAUSSIAN, so what
> is the advantage of LINDA over PVM or MPI or other portable and
> more-or-less standardized message passing systems? -- Does the combination
> GAUSSIN/LINDA beat alternative implementations (e.g. with PVM) in terms
> of speed or ease-of-use?
> 
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