Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!maytag!water!wlrush From: wlrush@water.waterloo.edu (Wenchantress Wench Wendall) Newsgroups: ont.events,uw.talks Subject: MASTER'S ESSAY PRESENTATION Message-ID: <2269@water.waterloo.edu> Date: 21 Apr 89 19:03:58 GMT Distribution: ont Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 49 DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO SEMINAR ACTIVITIES MASTER'S ESSAY PRESENTATION -Monday, April 24, 1989 Mr. Paul Cormier, graduate student, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waterloo will present a Master's Essay Presentation on ``Shoshin''. TIME: 2:30 PM ROOM: DC 1304 ABSTRACT Shoshin is a distributed software testbed supporting interprocess communication through message-passing primitives. It is based on a loosely coupled system in which messages are sent between Micro- Vax II machines via an Ethernet network. Recently, Shoshin was modified to support tightly coupled processors, in which it is possible to have more than one processor per Shoshin node. It was decided that an identical, trusted kernel would run on each processor in the multiprocessor node. In addition, the kernel would have to be modified to support semi-local interprocess communication, that is, message passing between processes on different processors, but within the same multiprocessor node. In this talk we present the Shoshin distributed operating system, its purpose and its usage. The primary and secondary bootstrap operations performed by the master and auxiliary processors are examined. This also includes some of the hardware limitations imposed on this design as a result of the MicroVax II architecture. The primitives supported by the Shoshin kernel to provide local and remote interprocess communication are examined and help us to derive the design alternatives considered for semi-local inter- processor communication. The advantages and disadvantages of each design are presented along with the design chosen and the algorithms used to implement this design.