Major Trends in Operating Systems Development

Operating systems have changed in nature in response to demands of users, and in response to advances in hardware and software technology. The purpose of this paper is to trace the development of major themes in operating system design from their beginnings through the present. This is not an exhaustive history of operating systems, but instead is intended to give the reader the flavor of the dif ferent periods in operating systems\u27 development. To this end, the paper will be organized by topic in approximate order of development. Each chapter will start with an introduction to the factors behind the rise of the period. This will be fol lowed by a survey of the state-of-the-art systems, and the conditions influencing them. The chapters close with a summation of the significant hardware and software contributions from the period

IICADS--integrated interactive computer aided design system

This research has three goals. The first goal is to develop a software interface (supervisor) to support and control a variety of interactive subsystem modules; thus eliminating manual scheduling of interactive jobs. The second goal is to develop a common methodology for interactive subsystem design. The third goal is to develop a linear systems analysis package using the facilities developed under the first two goals. A software interface (supervisor) to support and control a variety of interactive subsystem modules is described. The supervisor operates under the constraints of a large multiprogramming variable task operating system as opposed to a time sharing system. The supervisor not only eliminates the manual scheduling of interactive jobs, but also provides interactive users with a powerful dynamic linking mechanism. The supervisor permits the access of disk stored interactive modules in a random fashion. A methodology for developing interactive subsystems is presented. The problems of communicating between different high level languages are investigated and solutions are presented. In particular, a problem oriented language, interactive translator, is implemented using PL/1. The graphics service routines for this translator are coded in FORTRAN and ASSEMBLER languages. The techniques for adding graphics routines to existing programs, especially simulation languages, are formalized. A computer aided design program to assist in the initial phases of linear systems design is described. This program, developed for use at an on-line graphics terminal, allows the designer to describe a linear system in standard control engineering terms, and experiment with design alternatives during initial creative design phases --Abstract, pages ii-iii

EOS: A project to investigate the design and construction of real-time distributed embedded operating systems

The EOS project is investigating the design and construction of a family of real-time distributed embedded operating systems for reliable, distributed aerospace applications. Using the real-time programming techniques developed in co-operation with NASA in earlier research, the project staff is building a kernel for a multiple processor networked system. The first six months of the grant included a study of scheduling in an object-oriented system, the design philosophy of the kernel, and the architectural overview of the operating system. In this report, the operating system and kernel concepts are described. An environment for the experiments has been built and several of the key concepts of the system have been prototyped. The kernel and operating system is intended to support future experimental studies in multiprocessing, load-balancing, routing, software fault-tolerance, distributed data base design, and real-time processing

The PISCES 2 parallel programming environment

PISCES 2 is a programming environment for scientific and engineering computations on MIMD parallel computers. It is currently implemented on a flexible FLEX/32 at NASA Langley, a 20 processor machine with both shared and local memories. The environment provides an extended Fortran for applications programming, a configuration environment for setting up a run on the parallel machine, and a run-time environment for monitoring and controlling program execution. This paper describes the overall design of the system and its implementation on the FLEX/32. Emphasis is placed on several novel aspects of the design: the use of a carefully defined virtual machine, programmer control of the mapping of virtual machine to actual hardware, forces for medium-granularity parallelism, and windows for parallel distribution of data. Some preliminary measurements of storage use are included

libcppa - Designing an Actor Semantic for C++11

Parallel hardware makes concurrency mandatory for efficient program execution. However, writing concurrent software is both challenging and error-prone. C++11 provides standard facilities for multiprogramming, such as atomic operations with acquire/release semantics and RAII mutex locking, but these primitives remain too low-level. Using them both correctly and efficiently still requires expert knowledge and hand-crafting. The actor model replaces implicit communication by sharing with an explicit message passing mechanism. It applies to concurrency as well as distribution, and a lightweight actor model implementation that schedules all actors in a properly pre-dimensioned thread pool can outperform equivalent thread-based applications. However, the actor model did not enter the domain of native programming languages yet besides vendor-specific island solutions. With the open source library libcppa, we want to combine the ability to build reliable and distributed systems provided by the actor model with the performance and resource-efficiency of C++11.Comment: 10 page

Experiences in Using a Multiparadigm and Multiprogramming Approach to Teach an Information Systems Course on Introduction to Programmi

In the current literature, there is limited evidence of the effects of teaching programming languages using two different paradigms concurrently. In this paper, we present our experience in using a multiparadigm and multiprogramming approach for an Introduction to Programming course. The multiparadigm element consisted of teaching the imperative and functional paradigms, while the multiprogramming element involved the Scheme and Python programming languages. For the multiparadigm part, the lectures were oriented to compare the similarities and differences between the functional and imperative approaches. For the multiprogramming part, we chose syntactically simple software tools that have a robust set of prebuilt functions and available libraries. After our experiments, we found that the students were strongly biased towards memorizing the syntax of these languages, jeopardizing their ability to learn to think algorithmically and logically in order to solve the given problems. We believe that teaching students using multiparadigm and multiprogramming techniques could be discouraging, especially for those students with no programming experience. In this research study, we present the results of applying this approach together with the achievements, failures, and trends of the students who were taught with this multipath system