SSS-PC
The Dependable Scalable Operating System

What's New?

• 4 Feb, 2003: NRFS for linux 0.05 has been released. Download it from here.
• 27 Jan, 2003: Press release from NII on 20.Jan.2003 has been translated.
• 24 Jan, 2003: English page is open now.
• 22 Jan, 2003: Added task migration demonstration.
• 22 Jan, 2003: Added SSS-PC papers, performance, and demonstration pages. Added images of development cluster systems.
• 21 Jan, 2003: Updated poster images.
• 20 Jan, 2003: SSS-PC home page opened.
• 28 Feb, 2002: SSS-PC Ver. 0.0 (for PC-AT and compatible computers) completed; latest paper added

Operating System that integrates PCs and servers.

SSS-PC project team developped the next generation operating system `SSS-PC' (pronounced `three ess pc') Ver. 1.0 which runs on personal computers (PC). SSS-PC is being developped at Information Science Laboratory, Ltd. and will be released as its main product in the future.

SSS-PC is the dependable scalable operating system feturing unique new technologies such as Memory Based Communication Facility (MBCF) and Information Disclosure Mechanism (IDM) in addition to basic kernel functions such as memory protection and multitasking.

SSS-PC has task migration functionality and a unique scheduling system based on Free Marked Mechanism (FMM) and lets users perform maintenance jobs such as machine replacement, hardware component inspection and dynamic system reconfiguration without stopping running applications. The project team is working hard to alpha release SSS-PC by the end of 2003. The project team will reinforce SSS-PC with high dependable features to make it a foundation platform of dependable computing.
Below are poster pictures describing SSS-PC's features and performance evaluations. PDF versions are availble.

[PDF of first panel (800KB)] [PDF of second panel (258KB)]

The SSS-PC project is supported by the Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA) since 1994. From July 2002, SSS-PC is being developped at Information Science Laboratory, Ltd. , wich was established as a part of promotion effort for industry and academy tie-up, with support from National Institute of Informatics of japan

Project Background and Goal

Integrating wide spread PCs and work stations to a cluster system constructs a low priced, higly-dependable high-performance computer system. However, existing operating systems lacked functionality, performance and scalability for such purpose. The project team tackled the issue and developped a new operating system SSS-PC. Modern society's richness is backed by a lot of computer system all over the places. Computer system's high dependability and high availability is one of primal requirements from such society. SSS-PC offers not only high performance system but also higly-depnedable and higly-available system. SSS-PC can integrate upto a hundred thousands of PCs and server machines.

SSS-PC is the successor of SSS-CORE. SSS-PC is a brand-new all-Japanese general-purpose OS developed from scratch. It is the first general-purpose operating system produced in japan since the TRON project had been promoted. It turns workstations on LAN into a high-performance parallel machine. This is a remarkable advantage of SSS-PC over other OS's.
SSS-PC is applicable to a cluster with as many as a hundred thousand of PCs, workstations or servers, as to a single machine.

Pictures below show test clusters with PentiumIII or Xeon PC servers or Sun workstations running SSS-PC Ver.1.0. Click on pictures to view larger images.

PCs	WS's	PCs and WS's

These are the project teams's test and verification cluster system.

Features of SSS-PC

The features of SSS-PC are explained here. It contains the following topics.

• Memory-Based Communication Facilities: MBCF
• Task migration
• Free Market Mechanism scheduling: FMM
• Information Disclosure Mechanism: IDM
• Linux/UNIX compatible program development environment
• Distributed Shared Memory: UDSM/ADSM
• Optimizing compiler: RCOP
• OS kernel: Micro Core
• Miscellaneous

Performance

• Parallel execution of Parallel POV-Ray

www.ssscore.org has SSS-CORE's performance evaluation from various angles. You can see summarized results of the evaluation such as:

• Performance of fundamental system calls
• Fundamental communication performance of MBCF
• Communication performance of MPI/MBCF
• Efficiency of MPI/MBCF for the NAS Parallel Benchmarks
• Performance of the RPC with MBCF
• Efficiency of RCOP for the SPLASH-2 suite

Papers

• A Study on Memory-Based Communication and Synchronization in Distributed-Memory Systems
  Takashi Matsumoto
  Information sceience department, university of tokyo, technical report TR01-01, October 2001
  [PDF (903KB, a4) | PDF (903KB, letter) |abstract ]

• General ideas of SSS-CORE
• MBCF (Memory-Based Communication Facilities)
• RCOP (Remote Communication OPtimizer), and UDSM (User-level Distributed Shared Memory) and ADSM (Asymmetric Distributed Shared Memory)
• Scheduling strategy
• SSS-Server

Demonstrations

SSS-PC's demonstrations are provided.

• Task migration
• Parallel task execution of parallel POV-Ray's
• Multiple task execution of parallel applicatoins

• Multitasking execution of parallel applications
• Ray tracing
• Mandelbrot set visualization
• Movies on flying cubes
• Multi-screen movie

Project Plan for the Future

SSS-PC Ver.1.0 features Free Marker Mechanism scheduling (*1) and task migration function to realize system maintenance without applications and system suspension and dynamic system reconfiguration. With the help of these features, SSS-PC will implement Redundant Decision-by-majority function to make itself a foundation platform for dependable computing. With the function, application outputs are decided through decision by majority process among multiple instances of identical application tasks to make the best use of multiple computers avilable. SSS-PC provides software development environment compatible with other OSes such as Linux or FreeBSD. Using the environment, the project team parallelize some of existing softwares and implement killer application for SSS-PC.

(*1) The study of 'Free Market Mechanism' scheduling is supported by Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST).

Official Mascot

This cat is the official mascot of SSS-PC. It is named `Manekikko'. It was designed from a Japanese lucky cat `manekineko'.