Parallel computing and the OS

Frans Kaashoek's talk divided research on parallelism in operating systems in 4 periods. Around the first SOSP, the OS community introduced foundational ideas for parallel programming, covering three types of parallelism in operating systems: user-generated parallelism, I/O parallelism, and processor parallelism. With the advent of distributed computing, the OS community focused its attention to make it easy for server programmers to exploit parallelism, in particular I/O parallelism. With the arrival of commodity small-scale multiprocessors, the OS community "rediscovered" the importance of processor parallelism and contributed techniques to scale operating systems to large number of processors. These techniques found their way in today's main-stream operating systems because today's processors contain by default several cores. Because software must be parallel to exploit multicore processors, the OS community is going through a "rebirth" of research in parallel computing.