MayaJala: A Framework for Multiparty Communication

ID
TR-2003-10
Authors
Chamath Keppitiyagama and Norman C. Hutchinson
Publishing date
September 12, 2003
Length
12 pages
Abstract
The availability of higher bandwidth at the end-points has resulted in the proliferation of distributed applications with diverse communication needs. Programmers have to express the communication needs of such applications in terms of a set of point-to-point communication primitives. Such an approach has several disadvantages. These include the increase in development time, the difficulty in getting the complex communication structure right and the redundancy in several developers doing the same work to achieve the same communication pattern. If common communication patterns are available as well defined communication types these problems can be avoided. A similar approach has already been used in the parallel programming domain; message passing parallel programs use collective communication primitives to express communication patterns instead of composing them with point-to-point communication primitives. This is not the case for distributed programs in general. In this paper we discuss different multiparty communication types and also a framework to implement and make them available to distributed programs.