7vikpeculiar / distributed_systems_assignment_4

Problem 1

• The idea is to spawn N processes and give the token to process 0
• Each token is passed by process i to process i+1
• The N-1 process passes it to process 0
• To Name the processes as 0,1,2...N-1; register is used, as register cant handle integers directly, Pid I is converted to string and finally an atom
• Each process on getting the token, writes to the Output file
• Process 0 first sends the token, and recieves it from process N-1 and then prints it.
• All other processes print as soon as the token is received and forward the token to the next process

Problem 2

• The idea is to split the original list to N pieces each piece is individually sorted and finally all the results are combined
• Given L length list and N processes
• The main process spawns N=16 children
• The first N-1 processes get L/N-1 elements, whereas the last processes gets the left over L%N-1 elements
• Each process calls merge sort recursively and uses the inbuilt merge function
• After each processes is done it sends its sorted list to the parent
• The parent then merges them starting with the empty list and merging the incoming list
• After all lists are merged into a single list, the parent process writes it into a file