Inter‐process communication in MVS/XA and applications for scientific and engineering information processing

This paper surveys inter‐process communication in MVS/XA (multiple virtual system/extended architecture) and explores the use of cross‐memory services for this purpose. The lack of high‐level interfaces to system services is a major handicap in MVS/XA. Tools to provide high‐level services, in particular, tools for inter‐process communication, can be implemented in a simple, elegant and efficient way. The implementation and use of a communication subsystem, the extended communication facility (ECF), are also described. The ideas and mechanisms presented are useful for many scientific and engineering applications running under MVS/XA. Examples include distributed systems, applications using concurrent programming, a quasi‐batch environment, communication subsystems, and mail subsystems.