Support for Ada intertask communication in a message-based distributed operating system

The application environment and hardware base this paper addresses are Ada applications running on a testbed of modern networked multiprocessor workstations. The authors address the question of how an operating system´s communication facilities should be designed to best support Ada intertask communication running on this hardware. Ada has directives specifically designed to support parallel operation of tasks by facilitating communication and synchronization between them. Support for these directives using the communication facilities of the BIGSAM distributed operating system is presented. The BIGSAM kernel provides message based communication for the processes that run on it, a mechanism that is well matched to the Ada intertask communication primitives. The authors analyze the distributed operating system message passing functionality required to support the intertask communication and synchronization primitives on which the Ada rendezvous is based