Unicos

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
UNICOS
developer Cray Inc.
License (s) Proprietary
Current  version 10.0.1.2 (May 2003)
ancestry UNIX
↳ UNIX System V
↳ UNICOS
Architecture (s) Cray-1 , Cray-2 , X-MP , Y-MP , Cray C90
www.cray.com

UNICOS is a commercial Unix - Operating system of the supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc and for the operation of vector - mainframes designed.

history

COS and CX-OS

In 1985 the company Cray Research (later Cray Inc) brought the vector supercomputer Cray-2 as a further development of the Cray-1 on the market. Since large parts of the Cray Operating System (COS) used up to that point were programmed in assembler , the decision was made early on to port the UNIX System V Release 2, which was largely programmed in C, cheaper and faster as the basis for the new Cray-2 systems. In 1984 the first version of the new UNIX operating system CX-OS , which supported the Cray X-MP , was completed. At that time, however, it was mainly a demonstration system for the possibilities of a UNIX operating system for mainframes.

UNICOS

With the introduction of the Cray-2, the system was renamed UNICOS (UNIx Cray Operating System) and on April 3, 1986 in version 1.0 for the operation of Cray-1M , Cray-1S , Cray X-MP and Cray-2 systems Approved.

Over the next few years and ten versions, UNICOS developed into a UNIX-based mainframe system with complete resource and user control, multilevel security (MLS), multithreading , scientific high-performance computing and complete POSIX conformity. The main focus was on performance and scalability , which was, however, at the expense of flexibility, and so a complete restart had to be carried out for a long time when the file system was changed.

UNICOS / MAX and UNICOS / mk

With the introduction of the Cray T3D in 1993, massively parallel processing (MPP) found its way into the company's product line for the first time . For this purpose, the system was broken down into two essential components. The front end , a vector computer operated under UNICOS, was responsible for the input and output and supplied the back end, which consisted of a large number of processing elements (PEs or nodes) and took over the actual computing work. The PEs in the backend, in turn, were operated with the UNICOS / MAX microkernel system .

As the number of processors in the systems increased, it became more and more important to distribute the management of the system calls to several processors (so-called system nodes) in order not to have to accept waiting times. The result was UNICOS / mk , a microkernel-based, distributed operating system , which was derived from the real-time operating system ChorusOS and has been supplied with the Cray T3E since 1995 .

UNICOS / mp and UNICOS / lc

Some time after the merger between Cray Research and SGI , an operating system that was largely independent of previous versions was introduced in 2003 under the name UNICOS / mp . This is also a microkernel-based, distributed operating system, but it comes from IRIX 6.5. It has since been used on the systems of the Cray-X1 and Cray-X1E series. The current version 3.1 of UNICOS / mp was released in 2006.

In addition, UNICOS / lc , a mixture of Catamount (based on Cougar, which was used on ASCI Red ) for the calculation components and GNU / Linux for the service components , was created in the following years . It is used on systems from the Cray XT3 series.

literature

Web links