On Process Aliases in Distributed Kernel Design

As distributed computing systems become popular because of their functional, economics and reliability characteristics, a new class of problems has emerged. These problems are characterized by the fact that the resources being used by a process as well as the system state is distributed. The management of the processes and resources in such an environment present a challenge that cannot be satisfactorily met by the traditional procedural-based methods which often assume the existence of shared memories. This paper presents a multiagent structure consisting of corporate processes and their associated aliases as an efficient and systematic solution to this class of problems. The model and the kernel primitives necessary to implement the model together with some design considerations are outlined. An example described in terms of the model is also given.