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DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

MASTER'S ESSAY PRESENTATION

                    -Wednesday, December 20, 1989 (NOTE DATE!!)

Mr.  Allan  Wong,  graduate  student, Dept. of Computer
Science  will  speak  on ``User-Level Shared Memory for
Shoshin.''

TIME:                 9:30 a.m.

ROOM:                 DC 1331

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 MicroVAX 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.  In  addition to local memory for
each processor, global memory can be made accessible to
every  processor  in  the same node.  To make effective
use  of  this  global  memory,  a  set of shared memory
primitives  has  been designed and implemented to allow
this  global  memory  to be shared by user processes in
the same Shoshin node.

We   begin  this talk by outlining the structure of the
Shoshin  distributed  operating   system,  its  purpose
and   its   usage.   A  selection  of  previous work on
shared  memory  is  described.  Then  the shared memory
primitives  designed for Shoshin are presented. This is
followed   by   a  discussion  of  the  advantages  and
disadvantages    of    some   of   the   implementation
alternatives.    An  application  program  designed  to
utilize  the  primitives is illustrated and performance
results for it are examined.

                   December 14, 1989