Communication Patterns in Distributed Computations

Abstract

This paper identifies two classes of communication patterns that occur in distributed computations and explores their properties. It first examines local patterns, primarily IO and OI intervals, that occur at nodes in distributed computations. These local patterns form building blocks that are then used to define the global patterns, termed segments and paths, that occur across nodes in distributed computations. By controlling the predicates on the local patterns used to define segments and paths, various types of segments and paths can be defined. While a causal chain captures only the causality relation, it turns out that some of the other message sequences that do not capture causality also play a significant role in the analysis of a distributed computation. The paper presents a framework and shows that a number of key concepts and structures characterizing distributed computations are specific instantiations of the communication patterns identified in the framework.