Architecture for a multi-user general-purpose parllel system
Dror G. Feitelson, Larry Rudolph · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News · 1989
A multi-user general-purpose parallel system can make good use of the available hardware by sharing it among a mix of jobs with complementary requirements. The central task of the operating system in such an environment is to partition the machine dynamically between these jobs. We propose a new control structure to support this task, called distributed hierarchical control , which requires additional control processors to be placed on top of the parallel processors. Thus the processors are effectively organized in a tree structure, where the leaves are user processors and the higher levels are used for operating-system work; note that this structure is orthogonal to the interconneetion pattern between the user processors. Operating system algorithms for this structure are outlined.