John Shoch, Jon Hupp
Communications of the ACM, March 1982 Volume 25 Number 3, pp.172-180
ISSN 0001-0782
March 1982
Download PDF (869.9Kb) (You need to be registered on forum)The "worm" programs were an experiment in the development of distributed computations: programs that span machine boundaries and also replicate themselves in idle machines. A "worm" is composed of multiple "segments," each running on a different machine. The underlying worm maintenance mechanisms are responsible for maintaining the wormmfinding free machines when needed and replicating the program for each additional segment. These techniques were successfully used to support several real applications, ranging from a simple multimachine test program to a more sophisticated real-time animation system harnessing multiple machines.