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ISBN 0-13-437625-0 published by Prentice-Hall, 415 pages, $42.
See also <URL:http://www.prenhall.com/> or the book at <URL:http://www.prenhall.com/~ray/013/437624/ptr/43762-4.html>
Author: Gregory F. Pfister (pfister@austin.ibm.com)
Abstract: Forthcoming massively parallel systems will have distributed-memory architectures. They consist of several hundreds to thousands of autonomous processing nodes interconnected by a high-speed network. A major challenge in operating-system design for these architectures is to design a structure that reduces system bootstrap time, avoids bottlenecks in serving system calls, promotes fault tolerance, and is dynamically alterable and application-oriented.
This work describes the logical design of state-of-the-art parallel operating systems that have to meet the needs of both massively parallel computer architectures and massively parallel applications. The focus is on how to organize and structure these operating systems; this is not a discussion of algorithms that implement specific system features. Thus, it is a software engineering course explaining operating-system structuring rather than implementation. By starting on an abstract level, the ``big picture'' of a parallel operating system is stepwise refined. The refinement is carried out top-down to the implementation level, to give an impression of the message startup time overhead implied by a hierarchically composed system.
The design approach followed is to understand a parallel operating system as a 'program family' and to use 'object orientation' as the fundamental implementation discipline. The former concept (program family) helps prevent the design of a monolithic system organization, while object orientation enables the efficient implementation of a highly modular system structure. An in-depth presentation is given rather than a broad overview. Instead of discussing several designs more or less superficially, a single, elaborate case study is made on the basis of 'Peace'. The object-oriented design of the 'Peace' family of parallel operating systems is thoroughly discussed.
Author: Wolfgang Schroeder-Preikschat
Author: Prithviraj Banerjee (banerjee@crhc.uiuc.edu)