Guest Editorial on Multiprocessor Operating Systems
This special issue on multiprocessor operating systems started with a discussion at Sandia National Labs during the summer of 1995. We had heard rumors that USENIX Computing Systems would soon be ceasing publication, and USENIX had recently combined several of its distributed computing conferences into the symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). We wondered if there might soon be a backlog of high-quality papers on multiprocessor operating systems awaiting suitable publishing venues.
It appears that we were correct, and we are extremely pleased with the quality of the submissions for this special issue. We were especially happy to have received several interesting papers on OS kernel work. The final set of accepted papers include the five in this special issue, with two more papers to appear in future issues of Software-Practice and Experience.
Of the five papers appearing here, one focuses on distributed shared memory (ICARE), one on composing adaptive systems from modular subsystems (Ensemble), and another on memory management in a distributed operating system (XMM). The remaining two papers share experiences gained from building a distributed operating system for workstation clusters (GLUnix) and a single-address space operating system (Mungi).
We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to Doug Comer and Andy Wellings of the SP&E Editorial Board, our referees, and most especially, the authors.