NHSE Software Catalog

SUNMOS

url

ftp://ftp.cs.sandia.gov/pub/sunmos/

abstract

SUNMOS (Sandia/UNM Operating System) is a joint project between Sandia
National Laboratories and the Computer Science Department at the
University of New Mexico. The goal of the SUNMOS project is to develop
a highly portable, yet efficient, operating system for massively
parallel distributed memory systems.
Where we have to chose between performance and added
functionality, the decision usually favors performance.
Most of SUNMOS is concerned with reliable and fast message passing.
SUNMOS is a single-tasking kernel.
SUNMOS does not provide demand paging.
Once a SUNMOS application is loaded and running, it can manage
practically all of the available memory on a node and use the full
resources provided by the hardware.
SUNMOS is intended to take over the compute nodes of a system.
Applications are started and controlled from a host node process called
yod. The yod program runs on a SUN frontend for the nCUBE 2, and on a
service node on the Intel Paragon.

contact

Stephen R. Wheat / srwheat@cs.sandia.gov

contact

Stephen R. Wheat / srwheat@cs.sandia.gov

environment

The project was initiated in January 1991. The first step was to
develop an operating system that was compatible with Vertex, the vendor
supplied operating system for the nCUBE-2.
In Spring 1993 we decided to port SUNMOS to the Intel Paragon. It took
only three month to do so, attributing to the portability of SUNMOS.

keywords

parallel operating system; message passing;
massively parallel multiprocessor