The selection of topics and material for this book has been shaped by the authors’
perception of the importance of various subjects, as well as the coverage by the existing textbooks.
There are many books on distributed computing and distributed systems. Attiya and Welch [2] and Lynch [25] provide a formal theoretical treatment of the field.
The books by Barbosa [3] and Tel [34] focus on algorithms. The books by Chow and Johnson [8], Coulouriset al.[11], Garg [18], Goscinski [19], Mullender [26], Raynal [27], Singhal and Shivaratri [29], and Tanenbaum and van Steen [33] provide a blend of theoretical and systems issues.
Much of the material in this introductory chapter is based on well understood concepts and paradigms in the distributed systems community, and is difficult to attribute to any particular source.
A recent overview of the challenges in middleware design from systems’ perspective is given in the special issue by Lea et al.[24]. An overview of the common object request broker model (CORBA) of the Object Management Group (OMG) is given by Vinoski [36]. The distributed component object model (DCOM) from Microsoft, Sun’s Java remote method invocation (RMI), and CORBA are analyzed in perspective by Campbell et al. [7]. A detailed treatment of CORBA, RMI, and RPC is given by Coulouriset al.[11]. The Open Foundations’s distributed computing environment (DCE) is described in [28,33]; DCE is not likely to be enjoy a continuing support base. Descriptions of the Message Passing Interface can be found in Sniret al.[30]
and Gropp et al.[20]. The Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) framework for parallel distributed programming is described by Sunderam [31].
The discussion of parallel processing, and of the UMA and NUMA parallel archi-tectures, is based on Kumaret al.[22]. The properties of the hypercube architecture are surveyed by Feng [13] and Hararyet al.[21]. The multi-stage interconnection architectures – the Omega (Benes) [4], the Butterfly [10], and Clos [9] were proposed in the papers indicated. A good overview of multistage interconnection networks is given by Wu and Feng [37]. Flynn’s taxomomy of multiprocessors is based on [14].
The discussion on blocking/non-blocking primitives as well as synchronous and asyn-chropnous primitives is extended from Cypher and Leu [12]. The section on design issues and challenges is based on the vast research literature in the area.
37 References
The Globe architecture is described by van Steenet al. [35]. The Globus architecture is described by Foster and Kesselman [15]. The grid infrastructure and the distributed computng vision for the twenty-first century is described by Foster and Kesselman [16] and by Foster [17]. The World Wide Web is an excellent example of a distributed system that has largely evolved of its own; Tim Berners-Lee is credited with seeding the WWW project; its early description is given by Berners-Leeet al.[5].
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