Technical summary of the second IEEE workshop on workstation operating systems

  • Authors:
  • Luis-Felipe Cabrera

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
  • Year:
  • 1991

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Abstract

The broad spectrum of universities, industrial research laboratories, and computer companies represented at the Second IEEE Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems provided a rich snapshot of current activities in operating systems. There were representatives of 19 operating system research projects among the participants and several from commercial offerings. The attendees came from seven countries on three continents: North America, Europe, and South America.Since the last Workshop in 1987, there have been more advances in hardware than in software functions. Software standards continue to emerge in the areas of operating system interfaces, page description languages, window management interfaces, and communication protocols. New software applications exist in the areas of multimedia and multi-node computing. Object-oriented technology is already present in running systems and gaining importance. The areas that the participants perceived needing most future work were operating system abstractions, workstation operation, system responsiveness, input output, network services, management of clusters of workstations, and failure handling.While processor speeds, main memory access speeds, memory density, and secondary storage capacity continue to increase fast, disk seek times have decreased only slightly, and the bandwidth of most local-area networks has not increased at all. FDDI networks are just beginning to be deployed. The software is adjusting to this hardware scenario by using caching at multiple levels of the systems.In the last two years large main memories at individual computing nodes and multi-node computer installations have become common. It is expected that most future computing nodes will have substantial local storage and that high-bandwidth networks will enable the support of continuous media like vocie and video. Input output, to disks, to networks, and to user-oriented devices, is expected to become the central problem in future systems.