An environment for prototyping distributed applications

An environment for prototyping distributed applications is described that supports different communication primitives with specified delays, and provides primitives to aid debugging and evaluation. The environment also supports heterogeneous computation in which processes can execute on different hardware. Different source languages can be used for coding different modules of the processes. The system has a centralized control and monitoring facility which is based on the Suntools window system. This approach allows users to develop distributed applications using existing languages and packages, as opposed to restricting users to using only specialized specification languages, and extends the type of work done by R. Hayes et al. (1988) by providing primitives to assist in profiling and instrumenting the applications