An Extensible Choices System Interface

Traditional OS system interfaces, like the POSIX standard, lack the level of support and ease of programming needed to develop large parallel programs. In this paper, we first describe our vision for an extensible object-oriented system interface designed to cope with the challenges of highlyparallel systems. Ease of maintenance and portability is provided through language-independent interface specification and automatic code generation. We then detail our implementation based on the Choices OS and we show the effectiveness of our design by presenting a comparison between the POSIX thread implementation in Linux and our new system interface. 1