Abstract
The initial work on ‘worm programs’ was done by John Shoch and Jon Hupp at Xerox PARC [ 1 ]. The motivation for worms comes from the existence of computer networks in which conventional sharing of resources such as disc drives and printers take place, but in which no attempt is made to share the processing workload amongst the available processors . Shoch and Hupp thought of their Ethernetwork of Alto minicomputers at Xerox PARC as a gigantic multiprocessor, some of whose processing elements were in general being wasted at any one time. A worm program is one which can take maximum advantage of the population of free processors (‘free’ in the Xerox context means free according to constraints placed by other network users) by expanding its operations to encompass them as they become available, and according to its needs. This approach is to be contrasted with, for example, the Cambridge Distributed Computing System as described in [2], in which a processor from a pool is allocated to a user at the beginning of a session; worms on the other hand must be able to operate at a number of machines and respond dynamically to changes in processor availability at run time; moreover they may operate remotely from any computer to which their user happens to be logged-on. Control of worm programs at run time, in other words, is to be essentially decentralised.
This work has been supported by a grant from the Science and Engineering Research Council
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References
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© 1987 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Kindberg, T., Sahiner, A.V., Paker, Y. (1987). Worm Programs. In: Paker, Y., Banatre, JP., Bozyiğit, M. (eds) Distributed Operating Systems. NATO ASI Series, vol 28. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46604-5_14
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