Paros is an operating system micro-kernel specifcally targeted to
distributed parallel computers (DMPC). Paros is a general purpose
kernel that efficiently supports message passing applications
Paros integrates in a coherent interace functionalities encountered in two communities: operating system micro-kernel and heavy weight operating system developers on one side and parallel programming environment developers on the other.
Paros provides for DMPC functionalities comparable to those offered by Chorus or Mach. These micro-kernels have originated and evolved in the area of distributed systems and shared memory parallel computers and in general have been basically influenced by classical heavy weight operating systems for sequential and networked machines. They have nevertheless been proposed for DMPCs and porting efforts have been undertaken.
As any micro-kernel, it provides support for implementing the classical heavy weight OS funcionalities (file system, network access, medium and long term process control...), as subsystems on top of the lightweight kernel; directly supports a flexible process and communication model is specially targeted to efficiently support programming environments and models commonly used in the domain of distributed memory multiprocessors.
The Paros kernel has been first implemented on transputers. It is nevertheless a general purpose kernel portable to any distributed memory machine. Two basic features of Paros, lightweight threads and efficient communication, have very direct support on the transputer, but many other present architecture target two features.
With Paros, we provide subsystems offering some heavy weight OS functionalities and support of two programming models. A basic subsystem offers file access from anywhere in the machine. The programming models supported by this subsystem are basically the Inmos C and 3L Fortran models, extended to avoid the need of a root processor (uniformity, all task have the same functionality available).
Several applications can be loaded concurrently. Binary compatibility with existing sequential programs is also available. The stand alone tools can thus be run on top of Paros.