Using a single address space operating system for distributed computing and high performance

Recent 64-bit microprocessors have made a huge 18.4 quintillion byte address space potentially available to programs. This has led to the design of Operating Systems that provide a single virtual address space in which all code and data reside in and that spans all levels of storage and all nodes of a distributed system. These operating systems called SASOSs, have characteristics that can be used to support synchronization and coherency in a distributed system in ways that provide an improved program development environment and higher performance than that available from conventional operating systems. Sombrero, our SASOS design, makes use of its hardware support for object-grained protection, separate thread related protection domains and implicit protection domain crossing to provide synchronization and coherency support for distributed object copy set management not available in SASOSs built on stock processors. Its design, which provides direct system level support for object oriented programming includes a number of system architectural features targeted at modern distributed computing.