Operating system support for parallel computation

Abstract

Parallel systems are not necessarily special-purpose machines. At present, most departmental servers already resort to shared memory multiprocessing as a means to increase performance, while a network of workstations can also be regarded as a distributed memory parallel system. This paper examines the support offered by the operating system to exploit such parallelism. After discussing the design of multi-threaded programs in a Unix environment, a comparison is made with their distributed counterparts. Some performance figures obtained on a SparcCenter 2000 multiprocessor. on a network of workstations and on a transputer-based system are presented.