Cray Research, Inc.

Timothy W Hoel

Steven Paul Reinhardt

Frank R Barriuso

Mark Furtney

Suzanne L LaCroix

Clayton D Andreasen

Three new, efficient protocols for providing communications between a user's application program, a Multiprocessing Library, and the host Operating System is described. These new protocols are termed WAKEUP, GIVEUP, and CONTEXT-TO-USER-SPACE. They utilize the concept of a conduit through which the Operating System and the user application program can communicate without the need for expensive system calls. A primary use for the new protocols is the scheduling of multiple Central Processing Units (CPUs) into a single user program in a multi-CPU, multiprogramming, multi-tasking environment. WAKEUP allows a master process to quickly request the asynchronous scheduling of slave processes to help execute parallel tasks. GIVEUP allows a slave process time to finish a task before Operating System interruption. Once completed with its task, there is no need to save the context of the slave process. CONTEXT-TO-USE-SPACE allows other slave processes the opportunity to execute interrupted tasks that were not allowed to finish under GIVEUP.

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Eagan, MN, United States of America

Timothy W Hoel