Using Naming Strategies to Make Massively Parallel Systems Work

Issue title: Operating system Support for Massively Parallel Computer Architectures

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Schmidt, Henning

Affiliations: German National Research Center for Computer Science, GMD FIRST at the Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Abstract: To handle massively parallel systems and make them usable, an adaptive, application-oriented operating system is required. The application orientedness is represented by the family concept of parallel operating systems. Incremental loading of operating system services supports the family character by automatically extending the system's active object structure when it is necessary. This way, also the switching between different operating system family members may be realized. A new active object will be incrementally loaded if its invocation fails because it does not yet exist. This is noticed during object binding while using the naming services. The use of the naming system is exploited and extended to get a flexible and configurable mechanism for triggering incremental loading. This mechanism is built by the freely definable naming strategies and exceptions that result again in a family, namely a family of naming services.

Journal: Scientific Programming, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 289-300, 1994