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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.