Team Shoshin is an extension of Shoshin, a testbed for distributed software developed at the University of Waterloo. Part of the functionality of Shoshin can be attributed to its transparent treatment of remote interprocess communication. This is accomplished by having a special system process, the communications manager, handle the exchange of messages between machines. Shoshin's new hardware environment is significantly different from what it was originally designed on. This thesis describes the problems the new hardware presented and how those problems were overcome. Performance measurements of the time required for both local and remote message exchanges are made and compared. Using this empirical data, a simple model of the remote message exchange protocol is developed to try and determine how to improve performance. The software and hardware enhancements made to Shoshin have resulted in an improvement in system interprocess communication performance by a factor of four. Finally as a demonstration of Shoshin's interprocess communications facilities a simple UNIX based file server is implemented. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

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