Toward an operating system that supports parallel processing on nondedicated clusters

Present operating systems are not built to support parallel computing on clusters - they do not provide services to manage parallelism, i.e., to manage parallel processes and cluster resources. They do not provide support for both programming paradigms, Message Passing (MP) or Distributed Shared Memory (DSM). Due to poor operating systems, users must deal with computers of a cluster rather than to see this cluster as a single powerful computer. There is a need for cluster operating systems. We claim that it is possible to develop a cluster operating system that is able to efficiently manage parallelism, support MP and DSM and offer transparency. To substantiate this claim the first version of a cluster operating system managing parallelism and offering transparency, called GENESIS, has been developed.