Performance and transparency of message passing and DSM services within the GENESIS operating system for managing parallelism on COWs

Abstract

The primary paradigm for building parallel applications for execution on clusters of workstations (COWs) can be generalised into message passing (MP) and distributed shared memory (DSM). Unfortunately the currently available run-time environments and operating systems do not provide satisfactory levels of transparency, management support, and only support either MP or DSM. We propose a unique and novel approach where the MP and DSM services are provided to the application programmer as a cohesive and comprehensive set of parallel processing servers that are integral components of an operating system. The performance of a number of common parallel applications, employing both MP (raw and PVM based) and DSM, demonstrate the high quality of the proposed approach.