Administrators and multiprocessor rendezvous mechanisms

This paper discusses rendezvous on multiprocessors. Three different approaches are compared, represented by three specific systems: Ada, Harmony and BNR Pascal. All three permit tasks to run on multiple processors and use blocking communications primitives, but there are significant differences. For example, control over replying to messages out of sequence and over the allocation of tasks to processors is omitted in Ada, but is available in Harmony. The approach represented by BNR Pascal follows a middle road between Harmony and Ada: a low level protocol, invisible to the programmer, is used to ensure communications reliability, but the programmer is aware of when a rendezvous is remote. If performance considerations and verbosity and robustness are ignored, all three approaches are equivalent. To illustrate this equivalence, and to demonstrate clearly the complexity of the Ada rendezvous, an Ada rendezvous administrator written using Harmony is described. A second method of adapting Harmony to Ada is also presented, in which the Harmony primitives are modified to be closer to Ada. In practice, using Harmony primitives directly will usually result in better programs. It is argued that something very much like the rendezvous adminstrator is needed for any actual implementation of the Ada rendezvous.