Performance of the Amoeba Distributed Operating System

Amoeba is a capability‐based distributed operating system designed for high‐performance interactions between clients and servers using the well‐known RPC model. The paper starts out by describing the architecture of the Amoeba system, which is typified by specialized components such as workstations, several services, a processor pool, and gateways that connect other Amoeba systems transparently over wide‐area networks. Next the RPC interface is described. The paper presents performance measurements of the Amoeba RPC on unloaded and loaded systems. The time to perform the simplest RPC between two user processes has been measured to be 1‐4 ms. Compared to SUN 3/50's RPC, Amoeba has one ninth of the delay, and over three times the throughput. Finally we describe the Amoeba file server. The Amoeba file server is so fast that it is limited by the communication bandwidth. To the best of our knowledge this is the fastest file server yet reported in the literature for this class of hardware. Copyright © 1989 John Wiley & Sons, Lt

An Efficient Reliable Broadcast Protocol

Many distributed and parallel applications can make good use of broadcast communication. In this paper we present a (software) protocol that simulates reliable broadcast, even on an unreliable network. Using this protocol, application programs need not worry about lost messages. Recovery of communication failures is handled automatically and transparently by the protocol. In normal operation, our protocol is more efficient than previously published reliable broadcast protocols. An initial implementation of the protocol on 10 MC68020 CPUs connected by a 10 Mbit/sec Ethernet performs a reliable broadcast in 1.5 msec

The Performance Of The Amoeba Distributed Operating System

Amoeba is a capability-based distributed operating system designed for high performance interactions between clients and servers using the well-known RPC model. The paper starts out by describing the architecture of the Amoeba system, which is typified by specialized components such as workstations, several services, a processor pool, and gateways that connect other Amoeba systems transparently over wide-area networks. Next the RPC interface is described. The paper presents performance measurements of the Amoeba RPC on unloaded and loaded systems. The time to perform the simplest RPC between two user processes has been measured to be 1.4 msec. Compared to SUN 3/50's RPC, Amoeba has 1/9 the delay, and over 3 times the throughput. Finally we describe the Amoeba file server. The Amoeba file server is so fast that it is limited by the communication bandwidth. To the best of our knowledge this is the fastest file server yet reported in the literature for this class of hardware...