Incorporating input/output operations in LINDA

LINDA is a coordination model which, amongst other things, provides means for abstracting away from the location of information in distributed environments. Although the concept of location abstraction is important, and eases the programming task, it is incomplete in the LINDA case. Whenever I/O operations are necessary, users have to be aware of the locations of devices. The use of computational language specific details for distributed I/O restricts the portability of LINDA programs. Hitherto LINDA has shown us how to write portable distributed algorithms for a variety of applications but for applications involving I/O the portability is compromised. In order to achieve maximum portability, a LINDA application has to access I/O using proper LINDA facilities. This paper describes a generalisation of LINDA that includes coordination of distributed I/O. The advantages of such a generalisation and the problems involved in the implementation are also discussed