Threads and Remote System Calls: A Case Study of Their Utility and Performance on UNIX(R)'s RCP

Introduction: Network technology drives the demand for greater sharing of an organization's computing resources. Current research has been quite successful in certain key areas, like remote file sharing. Examples of systems that provide an efficient remote file system are AT&T's Remote File Sharing (RFS) and Sun Microsystem's Network File System (NFS). Although theses services allow interconnected machines to share data, they do not, however, allow sharing of other resources, such as processors. To obtain such sharing one must usually resort to mote login programs.