Linda Meets Unix

Reviewer: Thomas Narten

This combination tutorial and introductory paper on the difficulties of parallel programming reviews basic issues in parallel programming models. The author states some limitations of common approaches to writing portable, parallel programs and presents the Linda programming paradigm as an alternative that overcomes many of these limitations. Linda provides high-level language features (such as tuples) for describing potential parallel operations. A translator transforms the high-level description into an appropriate representation for the underlying hardware on which the program is to run, whether the hardware provides synchronization through shared memory or through message passing. The paper concludes with descriptions of Kernel Linda, a system-level Linda interface to the operating system, and QIX, a server-based operating system that provides a Linda interface. The paper is a general introduction to the material, and is oriented toward an audience unfamiliar with the area. As such, it is well written and informative. It also reports on significant implementation work (Kernel Linda and QIX). Unfortunately, the author provides insufficient technical details on such questions as performance and success in solving actual problems and does not give further references on these questions.