DIPC-a monitor for distributed inter-process communication

DIPC, a monitor for distributed inter-process communication (distributed IPC), is described. In a distributed environment, it transparently provides all important IPC constructs for communication and synchronization between processes, which are normally given by a modern conventional (uniprocessor) operating system environment. In addition, new classes of shared objects in the distributed environment may be included in DIPC. The paper defines the requirements for distributed IPC, then presents the user´s view of DIPC (a set of application programming interfaces for several classes of distributed IPC objects) and the DIPC implementation ideas. Existing example programs from the area of both distributed and parallel programming are mentioned