Plurix, a distributed operating system extending the single system image concept

The Plurix project implements a lean and high-speed object-oriented operating system (OS) for PC clusters. Communication between the cluster nodes is achieved via shared objects in a distributed shared memory (DSM), which is organized as distributed heap storage (DHS) containing both data and code. The consistency of the DHS is guaranteed by the strong transactional consistency model. The latter uses an optimistic synchronization scheme and restartable transactions, which ease the development of distributed applications. The OS (including kernel and drivers) is written in Java using our proprietary Plurix Java Compiler to translate Java source code directly into Intel machine instructions. Process migration in traditional OS is a difficult task as parts of the kernel state need to be saved and restored. The Plurix DHS extends the well-known single system image (SSI) concept by sharing almost all data and code. In this paper we present relevant parts of the Plurix architecture and show how process migration is implemented and simplified.