BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
          ID:: STAN//CSL-TR-98-753
       ENTRY:: February 26, 1999 
ORGANIZATION:: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
       TITLE:: Resource Management Issues for Shared-Memory Multiprocessors
	TYPE:: Technical Report
      AUTHOR:: Verghese, Ben
	DATE:: March 1998 
       PAGES:: 137
    ABSTRACT:: Shared-memory multiprocessors (SMPs) are attractive as general-purpose 
		compute servers.  On the software side, they present the same programming 
		paradigm as uniprocessors, and they can run unmodified uniprocessor
		binaries.  On the hardware side, the tight coupling of multiple
		processors, memory, and I/O provides enormous computing power in a single system,
		and enables the efficient sharing of these resources.  As a compute server, this
		power can be exploited both by a collection of uniprocessor programs and
		by explicitly or automatically parallelized applications.  This thesis
		addresses two important performance-related issues encountered in such
		systems, performance isolation and data locality.  The solutions presented 
		in this dissertation address these issues through careful resource
		management in the operating system.

		Current shared-memory multiprocessor operating systems provide 
		very few controls for sharing the resources of the system among
		the active tasks or users.  This is a serious limitation for a 
		compute server that is to be used for multiple tasks or by 
		multiple users.  The current unconstrained sharing scheme allows
		the load placed by one user or task to adversely affect the
		performance seen by another.  We show that this lack of 
		isolation is caused by the resource allocation scheme (or lack
		thereof) carried over from single-user workstations.  Multi-user
		multiprocessor systems require more sophisticated resource
		management, and we propose "performance isolation", a new
		resource management scheme for such systems.
NOTES:: [Adminitrivia V1/Prg/19980121]
         END:: STAN//CSL-TR-98-753