| A distributed system is a collection of loosely coupled computers of different types connected by a communication network and exchange messages through message passing. Computers in a distributed system do not share memory, but they share common resources like file systems, storage devices, and peripherals. Distributed systems offer significant advantages such as: decreased computation times of problems, improved performance and efficiency, easier modifications and extensions, and fault tolerance. However, distributed systems have some disadvantages and problems such as: problematic and costly communications among processors, unpredictable and unreliable communication links, and difficulty in developing distributed applications.;A distributed program contains multiple processes running in the same or different processors and cooperate in performing the same tasks. Programming distributed applications is a difficult task, specially if the programmer has to deal with low level communication mechanisms because it is a time consuming, tedious, and error prone process. There are not too many programming environments for the development of distributed applications. Therefore, programmers need tools for specifying, creating, and verifying distributed applications.;In this thesis, a framework for the development of distributed applications is designed and implemented. The framework simplifies the distributed application development. Also, we developed a library of routines that facilitates the production of application code for regular architectures like: binary tree, mesh, hypercube, etc. Furthermore, we designed a model for fault tolerant distributed applications. |
