SUMMARY OF INTER-PROCESS COMMUNICATION

Chenguang Kong

Outline Introduction Message Passing Communication Request/Reply Communication Transaction Communication Name and Directory Services Investigation on Future Work

Introduction A set of methods for the exchange of

data among multiple processes or computers

Divided into different methods based on the bandwidth and latency of communication between the processes, and the type of data being communicated Message Passing Communication Request/Reply Communication Transaction Communication

Message Passing A specification allowing computers

communicate with each other Lowest level of inter-process

communicate Two message passing primitives

Send(destination,message) Receive(source,message)

Two types: pipe and socket`

Message Passing Pipe

Unidirectional communication Implemented with finite size, FIFO byte stream buffer

maintained by the kernel One process writes data into tail end of pipe while another

process reads from head end of the pipe.

Message Passing Socket

A communication end point of a communication link managed by the transport services

The most popular message passing API The goal of secure socket layer:

Privacy by using symmetric cryptographic data encryption

Integrity by using message integrity check Authenticity by using asymmetric public key

cryptography

Request/Reply Communication Technique for one application to request

the services of another The layer upper message passing Remote Procedure Calls

Most widely used model Communication transparency A central component in most distributed

system

Request/Reply Communication Operations involving remote procedure call

Parameter Passing and Data Conversion What types of data can be passed How is it represented

Binding How does a client locate server and a server

register Compilation

Where do the stub procedures come from How are they linked

Request/Reply Communication Operations involving remote procedure

call Exception and Failure Handling

How are errors reported and dealt Security

Transaction Communication The basic unit of client-server process

interaction in a database system Every transaction is ACID compliant in

accordance with concurrency control and transparency in the DS

Transaction Communication ACID

Atomicity ALL or NO operations in a transaction are

performed Consistency

Consistent state is maintained before a transaction starts and after it concludes

Isolation Concurrent transactions DO NOT interfere with

each other Durability

transactions results are locked/ permanent after being committed

Transaction Communication Two Phase Commit Protocol

A type of atomic commitment protocol (ACP)

A distributed algorithm that coordinates all the processes that participate in a distributed atomic transaction on whether to commit or abort the transaction

Assures that ACID properties are achieved

Transaction Communication Two Phase Commit Protocol

Transaction Communication X/OPEN XA

Standard specification for distributed transaction processing (DTP) by The Open Group

describes the interface between the global transaction manager and the local resource manager

Two Phase Commit is used

Name and Directory Service Inter-process communication in

distributed systems relies on the support of a name service

A generic way of describing how a named object can be addressed and subsequently located by using its address

Enable user to reference network resources with short names instead of real addresses

Name and Directory Service Naming structureService/Object Attributes

Name structures Attribute partitioning

<arrtibutes>

<name, attributes, address>

<name, type, attributes, address>

Flat structure

Hierarchical structure name-based resolution(white pages)

Structure-free attribute-based resolution (yellow pages)

Physical <user.host.network>

Organizational<user.org.dept>

Functional<professor.cs>

Name and Directory Service Directory Service

The namespace for the network Used to hold one or more objects as named

entries The directory design process normally has a

set of rules that determine how network resources are named and identified

Name and Directory Service Implementations of directory service

X.500 a series of computer networking standards

covering electronic directory services developed by ITU-T and ISO DAP (Directory Access Protocol) DSP (Directory System Protocol) DISP (Directory Information Shadowing Protocol) DOP (Directory Operational Bindings

Management Protocol)

Name and Directory Service Implementations of directory service

Domain Name System: (DNS) Windows NT Directory Services (NTDS) Sun Java System Directory Server Apache Directory Server OpenDS …

Potential future work Virtualization in Cloud Computing

Every custom is arranged a virtual machine to serve them

Inter-process communication among the virtual machines is a non-trivial problem E.g. name service, network routing, directory

service

Potential future work Mixed network

Cellular network Sensor network Cyber physical network

Next generation network structure Current TCP/IP structure has many open

challenges Some researchers propose to construct next

generation network structure Many topics involving inter-process

communication

Reference Randy Chow, Theodore Johnson, “Distributed Operating Systems

& Algorithms”, 1997 Ammann, E.M. , "DIPC-a monitor for distributed inter-process

communication" Parallel and Distributed Processing, 1995. Proceedings. Euromicro Workshop on , vol., no., pp.272-279, 25-27 Jan 1995

Muelder, C.; Gygi, F.; Kwan-Liu Ma; , "Visual Analysis of Inter-Process Communication for Large-Scale Parallel Computing,", IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol.15, no.6, pp.1129-1136, Nov.-Dec. 2009

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Stevens, Richard. UNIX Network Programming, Volume 2, Second

Edition: Interprocess Communications. Prentice Hall, 1999 Mirtaheri, S.L.; Khaneghah, E.M.; Sharifi, M.; Azgomi, M.A.; , "The Influence of

Efficient Message Passing Mechanisms on High Performance Distributed Scientific Computing," Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications, 2008. ISPA '08. International Symposium on , vol., no., pp.663-668, 10-12 Dec. 2008