The 'convergence' of operating systems and distributed systems

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• Henry Robinson (Computer Laboratory)
• Tuesday 24 February 2009, 13:00-13:30
• Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, Room FW11.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Stephen Kell.

It’s become common to hear people working on operating systems for modern multicore machines assert that “computers are becoming much more like distributed systems”. In this talklet I hope to kick off a discussion about whether this is really true, and whether we can apply the techniques and models of traditional distributed systems theory to multicore machines without significant adaptation. I’ll present a short analysis of failure detection, network (a)synchrony and cost models in the context of a multicore machine, and demonstrate what I perceive as the important differences by showing how the theoretical solution to the consensus problem can be greatly improved upon with a little domain knowledge. There will be plenty for reasonable people to disagree about!

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory NetOS Group Talklets series.

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