Patterns for Parallel Software Design

4.8. 4.8 Remote Rendezvous

The Remote Rendezvous pattern describes the design of a remote, point-to-point, bidirectional and synchronous communication component that allows the exchange of information between a manager and a worker within a Manager–Worker application or between a shared resource and a sharer within a Shared Resource application. The manager and/or shared resource encapsulate a data structure, whose parts can be synchronously read from or written to by a single remote worker and/or a single remote sharer component. Data is allowed to flow from the manager/shared resource to the worker/sharer and vice versa. Components execute simultaneously. The rendezvous is considered remote, since components are designed to exist and execute on a distributed memory parallel system (although they can be used within a shared memory parallel platform).

4.8.1. Example

Consider the polygon overlay problem presented in Section 3.4, which describes the design of a parallel application using the Manager–Workers pattern [OR98] [Ort04] [Section 3.4]. The manager and several autonomous and distributed worker components execute on different computers, making up the processing components of the parallel program. The program is therefore developed on a distributed memory computer or system on which the programming language is capable of implementing a rendezvous or remote procedure call component [Bri78] [Har98] as synchronization mechanisms for remote interprocess communication. Although ...