Medusa

The design of Medusa, a distributed operating system for the Cm* multimicroprocessor, is discussed. The Cm* architecture combines distribution and sharing in a way that strongly impacts the organization of operating systems. Medusa is an attempt to capitalize on the architectural features to produce a system that is modular, robust, and efficient. To provide modularity and to make effective use of the distributed hardware, the operating system is partitioned into several disjoint utilities that communicate with each other via messages. To take advantage of the parallelism present in Cm* and to provide robustness, all programs, including the utilities, are task forces containing many concurrent, cooperating activities.