The Multics Input/Output system

Feiertag, Richard J.; Organick, Elliott I.

doi:10.1145/800212.806497

Cited by 33 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…On a number of points we were influenced by Multics, which suggested the particular form of the I/o system calls [9] and both the name of the Shell and its general functions. The notion that the Shell should create a process for each command was also suggested to us by the early design of Multics, although in that system it was later dropped for efficiency reasons.…”

Section: Influencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The UNIX time-sharing system

Ritchie¹,

Thompson²

1974

Commun. ACM

778

167

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UNIX is a general-purpose, multi-user, interactive operating system for the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/40 and 11/45 computers. It offers a number of features seldom found even in larger operating systems, including: (1) a hierarchical file system incorporating demountable volumes; (2) compatible file, device, and inter-process I/O; (3) the ability to initiate asynchronous processes; (4) system command language selectable on a per-user basis; and (5) over 100 subsystems including a dozen languages. This paper discusses the nature and implementation of the file system and of the user command interface. 2. Hardware and Software EnvironmentThe PDP-11/45 on which our UNIX installation is implemented is a 16-bit word (8-bit byte) computer with 144K bytes of core memory; UNIX occupies 42K bytes. This system, however, includes a very large number of device drivers and enjoys a generous allotment of space for I/O buffers and system tables; a minimal system Communications

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Section: Influencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The UNIX time-sharing system

Ritchie¹,

Thompson²

1974

Commun. ACM

778

167

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show abstract

“…Prefetching A key technique for improving I/O performance of workloads is prefetching, which dates back to as early as Multics [18]. A large amount of work on I/O prefetching utilizes hints about an application's I/O behavior, e.g., programmer-inserted hints [12,39], compiler-inferred hints [36], and hints prescribed by a binary rewriter [13].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dma-based prefetching for i/o-intensive workloads on the cell architecture

Rafique

Butt

Nikolopoulos

2008

Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Computing Frontiers

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Recent advent of the asymmetric multi-core processors such as Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE) has popularized the use of heterogeneous architectures. A growing body of research is exploring the use of such architectures, especially in High-End Computing, for supporting scientific applications. However, prior research has focused on use of the available Cell/BE operating systems and runtime environments for supporting compute-intensive jobs. Data and I/O intensive workloads have largely been ignored in this domain. In this paper, we take the first steps in supporting I/O intensive workloads on the Cell/BE and deriving guidelines for optimizing the execution of I/O workloads on heterogeneous architectures. We explore various performance enhancing techniques for such workloads on an actual Cell/BE system. Among the techniques we explore, an asynchronous prefetching-based approach, which uses the PowerPC core of the Cell/BE for file prefetching and decentralized DMAs from the synergistic processing cores (SPE's), improves the performance for I/O workloads that include an encryption/decryption component by 22.2%, compared to I/O performed naïvely from the SPE's. Our evaluation shows promising results and lays the foundation for developing more efficient I/O support libraries for multi-core asymmetric architectures.

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“…This particularly simple way of viewing files was suggested by the Multics I/O system. 8 The addressing mechanism for files must be carefully designed if it is to be efficient. Files can be large (about 10 9 bytes), are grown without pre-allocation, and are randomly accessible.…”

Section: The Structure Of Filesmentioning

confidence: 99%

UNIX Time-Sharing System: A Retrospective†

Ritchie¹

1978

Bell System Technical Journal

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The Multics Input/Output system

Cited by 33 publications

References 3 publications

The UNIX time-sharing system

The UNIX time-sharing system

Dma-based prefetching for i/o-intensive workloads on the cell architecture

UNIX Time-Sharing System: A Retrospective†

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