Message Passing , Remote Procedure Calls and Distributed Shared Memory as Communication Paradigms for Distributed Systems

Message passing and remote procedure calls are the most commonly used communication paradigms for interprocess communication in distributed systems. Distributed shared memory is an equally valuable but less often used paradigm. The advantage offered by distributed shared memory is that it abstracts away from the fact that the memory is distributed and allows the programmer to use the familiar shared memory model. However, this ease of use comes at a price, the overheads of DSM, at the operating system level, are significant compared with those of the other two paradigms. In order to establish whether DSM is worth implementing these overheads need to weighed up against the advantages offered by the paradigm. To this end we have evaluated and compared the three paradigms. In particular they are evaluated at the programming and operating system level and then compared based on their performance when used to solve the producer-consumer problem.