aviel@sdcsvax.UUCP (03/11/87)
In article <2765@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>, darrell@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU (Darrell Long) writes: > > I am looking for references on UNIX-based distributed operating > systems. I would be grateful if you could forward this query to the > readers of this group. Any implementation or those planned around > UNIX will be most welcome. Please mail pointers to > We at National Semiconductor Design Center in Israel have a fully operational UNIX based distributed operating system. This system, named NSMOS, is fully compatible with UNIX-5.2. It operates on several (currently up to 30) independent computers connected via Ethernet, each having its own resources such as memory, disks, tapes and terminals. NSMOS implements dynamic load balancing: Unix processes are migrated by the kernel while they are running, without the user's intervention or knowledge. Almost pointless to mention that the file system as well as the other functions of Unix are distributed. NSMOS supports distributed applications. Applications with potential parallelism in UNIX will actually run in parallel on NSMOS. (Yes.. parallel "make" and other alikes). The system is dynamically configurable. Processors may join the network without affecting the already-running processors. Processors may leave the network in an orderly manner. When a processor crashes, the rest continue in their operation, and only processes that were connected to the failed processor or processes that happened to run there are affected. Besides processor loads, the load-balancing algorithm takes into account the cost of remote I/O operations and of the migration itself. A process that does much I/O on files on a certain processor, will likely move to that processor. NSMOS currently runs on National's series 32000 family architecture, on National's VR32 (multi-user) development system (with 32332 @ 15MHz). An original prototype is described in: "Software Practice and Experience", August 1985: "MOS - A multi-computer operating system" For details write to aviel%nsta%nsc Darrell Long Department of Computer Science and Engineering, C-014 University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 92093 ARPA: Darrell@Beowulf.UCSD.EDU UUCP: sdcsvax!beowulf!darrell