Need help getting started!

[shantanusinghal]

My distributed operating system lab requires me to implement the election algorithm (bully and ring) in c.

My current idea is to run several instances of an ouput file on different terminal, each symbolizing a different process. Now i'm facing the following problem and if you guys could just point me in the right direction, that would be great!

To simulate the election process, i would require all the processes(instances of the program code im running in different terminals) to be aware of all the other instances. How can i achieve this?

[DeanMSands3]

Used shared memory.
This will help you get started.
http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/node27.html
http://digiassn.blogspot.com/2006/07/cc-unix-ipc-shared-memory-example.html

[shantanusinghal]

Used shared memory. This will help you get started.

On distributed systems, conceptually there is no common central memory so the communication should always be by means of message passing.

But from what i'ev leared from here , message passing requires prior knowledge of the recepient.

What i would like ideally is for there to be a list, to which each process subscribes on creation and each process can then broadcast to the entire list and the recepients can then send a direct message to the sender.

[DeanMSands3]

Ah, my bad.
Try this then.
Beej is the man.
http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html#broadcast