Supporting parallel programming in a distributed UNIX environment

A distributed processing system based on UNIX (trademark of Bell Laboratories) is currently operational at New Mexico State University. The system which is composed of a variety of PDP-11 and LSI-11 processing elements allows users to schedule tasks to run totally or in parallel on its satellite units. A UNIX-like kernel is run on the satellite processors and this allows virtually any process to run on any processing element. The architecture of the system is a star configuration with a PDP-11/34a as the central or host node. To support experiments in parallel processing, a parallel version of the C programming language has been developed which allows users to write programs as a collection of functional units which can be automatically scheduled to run on the satellite processors. In this paper the structure of the system is described in terms of hardware and software, and our implementation of pc, a parallel C language, is discussed.