Nomad: A Scalable Operating System for Clusters of Uni and Multiprocessors

The recent improvements in workstation and interconnection network performance have popularized the clusters of off-the-shelf workstations. However, the usefulness of these clusters is yet to be fully exploited, mostly due to the inadequate management of cluster resources implemented by current distributed operating systems. In order to eliminate this problem and approach the computational power of large clusters of workstations, in this MSc thesis we propose Nomad, an efficient operating system for clusters of uni and/or multiprocessors. Nomad includes several important characteristics for modern cluster-oriented operating systems: scalability, efficient resource management across the cluster, efficient scheduling of parallel and distributed applications, distributed I/O, fault detection and recovery, protection, and backward compatibility. Some of the mechanisms used by Nomad, such as process checkpointing and migration, can be found in previously proposed systems. However, our syst...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: IWCC
• Authors: Eduardo Pinheiro, Ricardo Bianchini
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Distributed File System, IWCC 1999, NOMAD, Operating Systems