Erlang Programming/Distribution

Distributed Processing

Theoretically, in Erlang, writing a parallel program for many computers is not much different from writing a program for a single computer. Each process on each processor has a unique id/name. Processes can be easily spawned. Messages can be easily sent and received. Each home directory on each computer will have a special Erlang cookie password file that allows access to Erlang processes on that machine.

The major problems people have writing distributed programs in Erlang are general network reachability issues related to firewalls and routers. you can make communication between two or more distributed node over network. if you want to communicate with node B from node A. then you can send message to node B as it is local process. you must specify node name to communicate such as:{pid,Nodename}!'hello node A'. where pid is process identifier of process on node B. to more generalization you should register name of the process. for example:register(pro,self()). now you can use pro in place of self().