Reliable distributed computing with the Isis toolkit [Book Reviews]

with the /Sf5 Toolkit edited by Kenneth P Birman and Robbert Van Renesse 398 PP $50 IEEE Computer Society Press Los Alamtos, Calif 1994 ISBN 0-81 86-5342-6 features, barely mentioning the host-based and symmetric configurations and not mentioning direct virtual memory addressing, a feature unique among buses. The book also discusses SBus’s operation in a hierarchy with MBus. An outline follows of two other buses in a hierarchy, XBus and XDbus, developed jointly by Sun and Xerox. Both are packetswitched buses, which enable data-routing during transfer rather than before, unlike all other circuit-switched buses. XBus is primarily a chip interconnect; XDbus can be used at the chip, board, or backplane level. T o maintain multiprocessor cache coherence, XDbus provides a hardware protocol that is a generalization of the multicopy write-broadcast protocol. Other interesting features include use of Gunning Transceiver Logic (GTL) transceiver technology, a separate transaction (rather than dedicated lines) to transport interrupts, and full support for the SWAP synchronization primitive. Two chapters on software complement the material on Sun’s approach to symmetric multiprocessing. One discusses a general model o f a multithreaded architecture used in Solaris for threads, lightweight processes, and kernels. Another covers programming facilities and their use at the application level: mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, readedwriter locks, and signals. T h e book ends with a chapter on three Sun multiprocessor implementationsSparcServer 600MP, SparcCenter 2000, and SparcServer 1000--and with a chapter on future trends, the weakest in the whole book, because it’s very nontechnical and superficial. Multiprocessor System Architectures can serve as an overview of the Sun technology as well as a reference handbook jor designers of multiprocessor systems based on Sun machines. However, those who need details about particular subjects should refer to other publications, such as The Sparc Architecture Manual, edited by David L. Waever and Tom Germond (Prentice Hall); S B w Handbook, by Susan A. Mason (Prentice Hall); Solaris 2.X Intemzals and Architecturtz, by John R. Graham (McGraw-Hill); and Th:reads Primer: A Guide t o Multithreaded Programming, by Bil Lewis and Daniel J. Berg (Primtice Hall) (see the review on page 76 of this issue). My only other complaint is that this book unnecessarily uses sales language; it is too often hard to distinguish commercial propaganda from valuable technical information.