Designing Parallel Operating Systems via Parallel Programming

Ever-increasing demand for computing capability is driving the construction of ever-larger computer clusters, soon to be reaching tens of thousands of processors. Many functionalities of system software have failed to scale accordingly–systems are becoming more complex, less reliable, and less efficient. Our premise is that these deficiencies arise from a lack of global control and coordination of the processing nodes. In practice, current parallel machines are loosely-coupled systems that are used for solving inherently tightly-coupled problems. This paper demonstrates that existing and future systems can be made more scalable by using BSP-like parallel programming principles in the design and implementation of the system software, and by taking full advantage of the latest interconnection network hardware. Moreover, we show that this approach can also yield great improvements in efficiency, reliability, simplicity.