A machine-independent port of the SR language run time system to NetBSD

Ignatios Souvatzis

SR (synchronizing resources) is a PASCAL - style language enhanced with
constructs for concurrent programming developed at the University of
Arizona in the late 1980s. MPD (presented in Gregory Andrews' book about
Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming) is
its successor, providing the same language primitives with a different
syntax.

The run-time system (in theory, identical) provides the illusion of a
multiprocessor machine on a single Unix-like system or a (local area)
network of Unix-like machines.

Chair V of the Computer Science Department of the University of Bonn
is operating a laboratory for a practical course in parallel programming
consisting of computing nodes running NetBSD/arm, normally used via PVM,
MPI etc.

We are considering to offer SR and MPD for this, too. As the original
language distributions are only targeted at a few commercial Unix
systems, some porting effort is needed.

The integrated POSIX threads support of NetBSD-2.0 allows us to use
library primitives provided for NetBSD's phtread system to implement
the primitives needed by the SR run-time system, thus implementing 13
target CPUs at once and automatically making use of SMP on VAX, Alpha,
PowerPC, Sparc, 32-bit Intel and 64 bit AMD CPUs.

We'll present some methods used for the impementation and compare some
performance values to the traditional implementation.

Developers

NetBSD

Standard

Ignatios Souvatzis is "System Programmer" (in reality, a
combination of system administrator, tape operator, kernel hacker, and
user advisor) at Chair V of the Computer Science Department at the
University of Bonn.

He is also a NetBSD key developer. His main tasks have been some
device drivers, a new ARP system, and maintaining the Amiga port.

Sometimes, those assignments overlap.

He studied Physics and Astronomy in Bonn. He has used nearly
everything running VMS from the 11/780 to MicroVAX, and everything
running Ultrix from the DECstation 2100 to the 5000/260 and even a
CDC Cyber 172 and a Convex to do astronomical data reduction.

Earlier at University, he (ab)used lots of different systems, from IBM
360 to 4331 to PC to solve the eight queens problem, has written test
programs for i8085-controlled vacuum pumps and UNIBUS-connected graphics
workstationsfor the new accelerator at the physics department.

In his second University year, he was introduced to Unix (on a Z8000 box) at a
small software company.

He seldom admits that he was teaching an introduction to BASIC at an
adult education center in late 1981/early 1982 (but it paid driving
home for the weekends).