In this course 1 , we introduce basic mechanisms to support parallel programs at operating system level on distributed memory parallel machines. Issues about process models and communication support are developed. As parallelism requires much more support than simple concurrency in classical multitasking environments, we define a set of abstractions, including new entities suitable for exploiting parallelism. Communication support can be divided into message passing and shared data. Parallel applications have specific requirements for communication; we analyse a basic set of essential communication protocols. Lastly, we briefly discuss caracteristics of distributed operating systems.
This work is partially supported by the ESPRIT programme under contract EP2528 Supernode II
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