George Wells and
Alan Chalmers
This work was carried while the first author was on leave from the
Department of Computer Science,
Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
An extended version of Linda (eLinda) has been developed to give the
application programmer a greater level of control over the underlying
communication. This has been done to improve the performance, and to
increase the flexibility with which data may be accessed. The
motivation for this has been to find a compromise between the
efficiency of the message passing of PVM and the simplicity of the
Linda shared memory model. This paper describes the architecture of
the eLinda implementation and its use of the message passing, task
group and database facilities provided by PVM. Sample applications
which have been developed using eLinda are also described, and
performance results presented to show the benefits PVM has to offer the
implementation of eLinda on a network of Sun workstations.
Linda is a registered trademark of Scientific Computing Associates.