AP/Linux - A modern OS for the AP1000+

Abstract

AP/Linux is an ongoing effort to develop a new operating system environment for the Fujitsu AP1000+ and successor machines. Based on the popular Linux operating system, AP/Linux provides modern operating system capabilities, such as virtual memory and multi-user support, as well as efficient communication facilities for parallel programs. Users can develop parallel programs using MPI or the CellOS-compatible APlib library. This paper describes the progress achieved thus far in developing the system, and presents results from some simple parallel benchmark programs showing that there is no loss of performance for parallel programs running under AP/Linux, compared with the standard CellOS environment. 1 Introduction The standard operating system provided with the Fujitsu AP1000+[2, 1] is CellOS. CellOS supports the execution of a single program at any given time. The CellOS kernel is short-lived in the sense that the machine is reset and the CellOS kernel is reloaded anew each time a pr..