Towards an efficient single system image cluster operating system

The lack of a single system image operating system (OS) for clusters restricts their use for parallel processing. We propose an approach for building an efficient single system image (SSI) cluster operating system. The proposed system implements distributed services performing global and dynamic resource management to offer high performance, high availability and ease of programming. The programming API of the OS running on each cluster node is kept unmodified but the high level OS services can benefit from all cluster resources. Our approach has been validated by a prototype based on Linux.