The current incarnation of the Piglet architecture, as described above, is the basis of my Ph.D. thesis research. This architecture represents a generalisation of the original Piglet model, focusing on the active kernel structure and asynchronous service invocation rather than functional division.
The thesis proposal below provides the most in-depth description of this architecture and future directions for Piglet, as well as a detailed dicussion of the concept of operating system intrusion. The technical report is a condensed version of the proposal, the primary difference being more in-depth coverage of related and future work in the proposal.
Piglet was originally conceived of to provide a similar capability to intelligent I/O devices, namely the capability to logically associate processing capacity with I/O functions. Rather than relying on specialised hardware, the goal was to utilise commodity SMP systems to provide I/O processors.
This architecture, originally known as AsyMOS, and a prototype implementation were described in a paper published at OPENARCH '98. The second paper, published at the 1998 SIGOPS European Workshop gives an expanded description of functional division and describes one example application, provision of QoS guarantees on a network device. A second example application, an MPEG-1 decoder implemented as a Piglet service is described in the very short (4 pages) NOSSDAV '98 paper (listed first).
This is a paper that I co-authored with Aled Edwards whilst working as a student at Hewlett-Packard Labs, Bristol. It was published in the Proceedings of SIGCOMM '95.
The title pretty much says it all about the paper - the design and implementation of a single-copy TCP stack, running in user-space on the HP-UX 9.01 variant of Unix. Most of the paper is a description of the structure of the implementation but there are also results for throughput and processor usage, and conclusions drawn from the project.
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Steve Muir Distributed Systems Lab University of Pennsylvania | This file last updated: 2000/06/19 20:26:29 |