Design Principles of Parallel Operating Systems - A PEACE Case Study

Forthcoming massively parallel systems are 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 massively parallel architectures is to design a structure that reduces system bootstrap time, avoids bottlenecks in serving system calls, promotes fault tolerance, is dynamically alterable, and application-oriented. In addition to that, system-wide message passing is demanded to be of very low latency and very high efficiency. State of the art parallel operating systems design must obey the maxim not to punish an application by unneeded system functions. This requires to design a parallel operating system as a family of program modules, with parallel applications being an integral part of that family, and motivates object orientation to achieve an efficient implementation. This report is a condensed version of the author's habilitation and will ..