An emulated environment for studying distributed systems

A distributed testbed for investigating the issues involved in distributed applications, studying different concepts and algorithms in practice, and gaining practical experience in utilizing distributed systems of various configurations is discussed. This testbed environment uses a network of Sun workstations (connected by an Ethernet) to emulate the behavior of distributed systems, with each individual workstation host representing a node. Communication links which implement process-to-process, multicast, and broadcast communications are used for the emulation of various distributed system organizations (e.g. Ethernet, token ring, and multistage interconnection networks). Application examples are given for three typical topologies.<>