SUNMOS (Sandia/UNM Operating System) is an

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

jointly developed by

Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), also known as Sandia, is one of three research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Headquartered in Kirtland Air Force B ...

and the Computer Science Department at the

University of New Mexico The University of New Mexico (UNM; ) is a public research university in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States. Founded in 1889 by the New Mexico Territorial Legislature, it is the state's second oldest university, a flagship university in th ...

. The goal of the project, started in 1991, is to develop a highly portable, yet efficient, operating system for massively parallel-distributed memory systems. SUNMOS uses a single- tasking

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

and does not provide

demand paging In computer operating systems, demand paging (as opposed to anticipatory paging) is a method of virtual memory management. In a system that uses demand paging, the operating system copies a disk page into physical memory only when an attempt is m ...

. It takes control of all

node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics * Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines ...

s in the distributed system. Once an application is loaded and running, it can manage all the available memory on a node and use the full resources provided by the hardware. Applications are started and controlled from a process called ''yod'' that runs on the host node. Yod runs on a

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

frontend for the nCUBE 2, and on a service node on the Intel Paragon. SUNMOS was developed as a reaction to the heavy weight version of

OSF/1 OSF/1 is a variant of the Unix operating system developed by the Open Software Foundation during the late 1980s and early 1990s. OSF/1 is one of the first operating systems to have used the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and ...

that ran as a

single-system image In distributed computing, a single system image (SSI) cluster is a cluster of machines that appears to be one single system. The concept is often considered synonymous with that of a distributed operating system, but a single image may be presente ...

on the Paragon and consumed 8-12 MB of the 16 MB available on each node, leaving little memory available for the compute applications. In comparison, SUNMOS used 250 KB of memory per node. Additionally, the overhead of OSF/1 limited the network bandwidth to 35 MB/s, while SUNMOS was able to use 170 MB/s of the peak 200 MB/s available. The ideas in SUNMOS inspired PUMA, a multitasking variant that only ran on the i860 Paragon. Among the extensions in PUMA was the Portals API, a scalable, high performance message passing API. Intel ported PUMA and Portals to the

Pentium Pro The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel and introduced on November 1, 1995. It implements the P6 (microarchitecture), P6 microarchitecture (sometimes termed i686), and was the first x86 Intel C ...

based

ASCI Red ASCI Red (also known as ASCI Option Red or TFLOPS) was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative ( ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the ...

system and named it Cougar.

Cray Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...

ported Cougar to the

Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation Microprocessor, processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''Sl ...

based

Cray XT3 The Cray XT3, also known by codename '' Red Storm'', is a distributed memory massively parallel MIMD supercomputer designed by Cray Inc.. Cray collaborated with and delivered to Sandia National Laboratories in 2004. The XT3 derives much of its ...

and renamed it Catamount. A version of Catamount was released to the public named OpenCatamount. In 2009, the Catamount lightweight kernel was selected for an R&D 100 Award.

References

External links

* tp://ftp.cs.sandia.gov/pub/sunmos/ SUNMOS FTP sitebr>A humorous field guide to differences between SUNMOS and OSFOpenCatamount
Supercomputer operating systems Sandia National Laboratories {{operating-system-stub

See also

References

External links