Operating System Support for Concurrent Remote Task Creation
Dejan Milojicic, David Black, Steve Sears
Open Software Foundation
Research Institute
1 Cambridge Center
Cambride, MA 02142
{dejan, dlb, sjs}@osf.org
Abstract
This paper describes improvements to the Mach microkernel's
support for efficient application startup across
multiple nodes in a cluster or massively parallel processor.
Significant improvements in application startup times have
been achieved by optimizing the existing remote task creation
operation, implementing a facility to concurrently
create multiple remote tasks in a single operation, and
restructuring the underlying distributed virtual memory
system to improve its scalability. One component of the
restructuring involves the use of a hierarchical tree of
objects to implement the paging path instead of a flat single
level tree; this eliminates bottlenecks at the node that
initiates the application. The other component consists of
limiting the copy on write virtual memory optimization to
single node operations; this achieves a separation of
network sharing (read/write) from network read access
(implemented by copy on reference). Although our
implementation is specific to Mach, the architecture and
design are applicable to other modern operating systems.
- Papers: Milojicic, D., Black, D., Sears, S.,
"Operating System Support for
Concurrent Remote Task Creation," to appear in the Proceedings of
the 9th International Parallel Processing Symposium, Santa Barbara,
CA, April 24-29, 1995.
- Slides
- Software: By May 1st, available as add-on or part of the
OSF Mach kernel distribution.