Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!cornell!ken
From: ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.isis
Subject: Re: Getting remote clients to talk to ISIS
Message-ID: <37220@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 12 Feb 90 14:39:04 GMT
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: jlevy%ee.technion.ac.il (Jacob Levy)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Technion
Lines: 37

(Ken -- I am sending this by mail since all my attempts to post to
comp.sys.isis failed. Feel free to repost it to the newsgroup.)

I think this is a great idea. Not all sites want to run ISIS.

Here is an example situation where the feature you propose would
be very useful.  I am building a distributed language on top of
ISIS, and this will make it much easier to make my language
implementation widely available. The situation I am thinking
about has any number of low-powered workstations talking to each
other in my distributed programming language environment. Running
ISIS on each station would be unacceptable since this would at
the very least cause the workstations to swap (through the net,
oy!). Also, this is a way to get much larger configurations right
now, even without waiting for ISIS to mature past the 128 site
limitation.

As an aside, I do not think that building a distributed language
on top of ISIS would strain its communication capabilities too
much, since all messages are fully asynchronous and can thus be
batched into big chunks. If I understood correctly from previous
discussions in the newsgroup, the time transmission cost of a
message is linear in its size and the factor is not very large.

Regarding progress, I expect to have a demo version of my system
by June or July. If everything works out OK, I plan to place it
in the public domain, so other ISIS users could certainly get a copy.

Cheers,
        --Jacob

[KB: I see no reason that a language like this couldn't run well on ]
[ISIS V2.0; in fact, it might have the advantage of being able to   ]
[plan to generate code that will respect the limitations on "bypass"]
[communication (basically, multicasting primarily within groups) and]
[hence give naive users a substantial performance benefit...        ]
[At any rate, V2.0 will definitely support remote (unix) clients.   ]