The TIPC user's manual

Abstract

This manual documents the Tipc inter-process communication protocol, which supports the implementation of Virtual Time [Jefferson 85] systems. Tipc can be used to write distributed simulations, as well as, other distributed applications. Tipc was developed in the Jade environment [Jade 85], and, to a large extent, depends on Jade. This document should be self-contained in that a user shouldn't have to refer to other sources of information to get a Tipc program to run. However, if you are interested in the implementation of Tipc, see [Xiao et al. 86]. The original plan for the implementation of Tipc is presented in [Cleary et al. 85]. A discussion of potential optimisations in the implementations appear in [West et al.87]. For those who know the Jade IPC protocol (Jipc), Tipc was designed to mimic Jipc as closely as possible. Tipc can be viewed as Jipc augmented with facilities for handling time. Specifically, Tipc has a few extra parameters to some subroutine calls and an asynchronous send primitive. Currently, Tipc is accessible only from the C programming language. Preliminary ideas for a prolog version are described in [Li & Unger 87].