CSP/Occam on networks of workstations

Abstract

This paper introduces oc-net, a software communications system which implements the CSP/occam model of communication and synchronisation across networks of workstations. The spotlight is initially directed towards the design of oc-net, the finer grain parallelism it accommodates, and its careful integration into the operating environment, which distinguishes itself, if mishandled, in being hostile to oc-net’s objectives. The second part of the paper describes a preliminary empirical measurement of oc-net’s raw message passing performance vis à vis popular parallel computing software for networks of workstations. Parallels are drawn between the latters’ unrestrained models of parallelism, and Occam’s carefully controlled communication topologies, to which various advantages can be attributed.