Multiprocessing via sockets

[Robert Scott]

I'm trying to turn a network of Sun4s in a multiprocessor executing a
parallel language.

So far I have implemented an interpreter for the langauge and can get two
machines to cooperate to solve problems by communicating though a single
socket.

I want to generalise the system. I want an unlimited number of machine to
be able to communicate. I can see that on each machine I need to create
an array of sockets of length N (the number of machines) so that each machine
can talk directly to any other.
How do I do this cleanly? 

My first guess is that each machine would have a deamon running on it listening
to a reserved port (like all the other deamons).
Then I would need to design some protocol whereby one of the interpreters, the
one connected to the human :-), would initiate startup by communicating
with the interpreters on the other machines via the appropriate deamon.

Apart from this very sketchy idea I haven't got a clue what I'm going to
do.

Has anyone tried this before (surely someone has) and do they have
advice for me?

Rob Scott
Department of AI
University of Edinburgh
EDINBURGH
SCOTLAND
rbs at uk.ac.ed.aipna