A Generic Distributed Monitor Construct for Programming Process Synchronization in Distributed Systems

摘要

The monitor construct has been implemented in several concurrent and/or parallel programming languages for shared-memory system environments, Extensions of the monitor to support process synchronization in distributed systems have also been proposed. But, most existing work only provides the architecture design of the distributed monitor. There is no discussion about the algorithmic and implementation issues. Also, none of them consider how to implement conditional variables. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a distributed monitor construct, named DisMoniC, for programming process synchronization in distributed systems. DisMoniC is generic in the sense that it can be used with any distributed mutual exclusion (DME) algorithm to implement exclusive access to the monitor operations. Time-efficient algorithms are proposed to implement conditional process synchronization in the distributed monitor. We also present performance evaluation of the proposed construct.