gdburns@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Greg Burns) (02/13/88)
Trillium Operating System (Cornell Theory Center) Trillium is an operating system designed for a loosely coupled, message passing ensemble architecture, such as the hypercube class of machines. It has been implemented for the FPS T-Series, a transputer based machine. Trillium presents a uniform programming environment that extends out of the parallel processors to encompass the front end computer and and personal workstations accessible over a network. By abstracting the entire parallel system to an arbitrary graph of nodes, both operating system and applications become highly portable. Trillium does not include any implicit support for parallel processing, but instead provides full explicit control of all facets of machine operation including reconfiguration of the operating system itself. It is an excellent testbed for experimentation with hypercube class machines as well as a solid foundation for higher level implicit parallel programming tools. Cornell's initial OS effort with hypercubes is completely practical in nature, and the Theory Center aims to provide a flexible C and Fortran programming environment attractive to scientific users.