SUNMOS (Sandia/UNM Operating System) is an

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

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 Bas ...

and the Computer Science Department at the

University of New Mexico The University of New Mexico (UNM; es, Universidad de Nuevo México) is a public research university in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Founded in 1889, it is the state's flagship academic institution and the largest by enrollment, with over 25, ...

. 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 lea ...

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 if 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, line ...

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 center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared rad ...

frontend for the nCUBE 2, and on a service node on the

Intel Paragon The Intel Paragon is a discontinued series of massively parallel supercomputers that was produced by Intel in the 1990s. The Paragon XP/S is a productized version of the experimental ''Touchstone Delta'' system that was built at Caltech, launc ...

. 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, an ...

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 introduced the P6 microarchitecture (sometimes termed i686) and was originally intended to replace the original ...

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 U ...

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 i ...

ported Cougar to the

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

based

Cray XT3 The Cray XT3 is a distributed memory massively parallel MIMD supercomputer designed by Cray Inc. with Sandia National Laboratories under the codename '' Red Storm''. Cray turned the design into a commercial product in 2004. The XT3 derives muc ...

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