American Telephone & Telegraph Co., At&t Bell Laboratories

Carol M McCullagh

Shih-Jeh Chang

Shafik J Hakim

Richard T Emery

Paul E Janssen

Jen-Lie Ho

A method and apparatus for transmitting messages from one processor to a plurality of other processors in a distributed processing system having no hardware message broadcast facilities. The transmitting processor includes a broadcast program process for controlling the transmission of any messages destined for a plurality of other processors. Different client processes in the transmitting processor request the broadcast process to transmit a broadcast message. The single broadcast process controls the number of individual messages which are sent out sequentially to each of the receiving processors in such a way as to ensure that the broadcast messages do not interfere with other message traffic that frequently has tighter delivery time requirements. The broadcast process transmits the broadcast messages to each of the plurality of recipient processors without waiting for acknowledgment response messages from any of these processors. The broadcast process collects received acknowledgment response messages and informs the client process of the summarized response results.

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Lisle, IL, United States of America

Carol M McCullagh