Software Development for Distributed Systems

My prime interest in participating in this session is to project the applicability of SP to the development of software for Distributed Computer Systems (such as the UC Irvine Distributed Computer System and the CMU C.MMP). The difficulties common to all software design and development efforts are made even more acute when writing software for a DCS. Setting up experiments that involve widely separated, loosely coupled computers is not an easy or straightforward task. Error situations may develop fortuitously and then evade most efforts to cause them to occur again. In this predicament, structured modular top-down programming techniques appear likely to play an important role since they offer an opportunity to bring significant software reliability improvements.