SSS-CORE
The General-Purpose Scalable Operating System

What's New?

• 20 Jan, 2003: press release of SSS-PC Ver. 1.0 (see press release documents here) ;
• 22 Oct, 2000: SSS-CORE Ver. 2.2 (for UltraSPARC) and Ver. 1.2 (for SuperSPARC) released; `task migration' (new feature in Ver. 2.3, Ver. 1.3) introduced; communication performance on Gigabit Ethernet reported; latest paper added
• 8 Apr, 2000: latest paper added
• 8 Dec, 1999: SSS-CORE Ver. 2.1 (for UltraSPARC) released; mascot presented; latest paper added
• 16 Oct, 1999: latest paper added
• 12 Jul, 1999: home and features updated; latest papers added; decorated
• 11 Feb, 1999: papers in PDF format added
• 22 Oct, 1998: latest papers added
• 15 Oct, 1998: decorated
• 14 May, 1998: renewal
• 1 Mar, 1998: first contact

Get Power of Supercomputer from Workstations

We are pleased to announce that SSS-CORE Project Team has developed a general-purpose scalable operating system `SSS-CORE' (pronounced `three ess core') Ver. 2.2 for UltraSPARC and Ver. 1.2 for SuperSPARC. This OS enables workstations in an office or a laboratory to cooperate with each other to process tasks efficiently. The power of supercomputer becomes available without introducing expensive dedicated parallel machines. We are now developing Ver. 2.3/Ver. 1.3 of SSS-CORE to improve functionality, usability, and performance.

The features and performance issues of SSS-CORE are summarized in the following posters. We regret to say that they are written in Japanese.

The SSS-CORE project is supported by the Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA).

Research Background and Goal

A Japanese-domestic general-purpose operating system was not produced since the TRON project had been promoted. SSS-CORE is a brand-new all-Japanese general-purpose OS developed from scratch. It turns workstations on LAN into a high-performance parallel machine. This is a remarkable advantage of SSS-CORE over other OS's.
There exist many computers in an office, in a laboratory, or in a factory, connected with LAN. In general, most of them are not assigned for tasks as hard as possible all the time. Although there are many `idle' machines, it takes too much time to perform a huge task such as large-scale simulation, if the OS is unable to assign a task to multiple machines. SSS-CORE can avoid such waste. It efficiently utilizes idle machines for parallel processing, and dramatically reduces processing time. SSS-CORE is applicable to a workstation cluster of ten thousand workstations, as well as to a single machine.

The University of Tokyo and IPA permit everyone to use SSS-CORE as a free software. We provide it for the information industry as one of fundamental technologies to construct a system with good cost-performance.

We now make researches in succession to apply the Memory-Based Communication technologies of SSS-CORE for high-speed and highly-functional networks of the gigabit class, supported by IPA. We have developed a prototype of `Memory-Based Processor II (MBP2)'.
We also work to apply the SSS-CORE technologies for low-cost and high-performance server systems, supported by IPA.

SSS-CORE Ver. 2.2 now works on a cluster of Sun Microsystems Ultra 60's and Ultra 2's (and compatibles) connected with Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet. SSS-CORE Ver. 1.2 works on a cluster of Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 20's (and compatibles) connected with Ethernet or Fast Ethernet. The following is a picture of a SSS-CORE system at Hiraki Laboratory, University of Tokyo. Please click on the image, or follow the link, to get a larger image.

There is no need to put SSS-CORE machines together in a rack. We do so just for convenience of experiments.

Features of SSS-CORE

The features of SSS-CORE are explained here. It contains the following topics.

• Memory-Based Communication Facilities: MBCF
• OS kernel: Micro Core
• Information Disclosure Mechanism: IDM
• Distributed Shared Memory: UDSM/ADSM
• Optimizing compiler: RCOP
• Miscellaneous

Performance

The performance of SSS-CORE has been evaluated from various angles. Here you can see summarized results of the evaluation such as:

• Performance of fundamental system calls
• Fundamental communication performance of MBCF
• Communication performance of MPI/MBCF
• Efficiency of MPI/MBCF for the NAS Parallel Benchmarks
• Performance of the RPC with MBCF
• Efficiency of RCOP for the SPLASH-2 suite

Papers

The papers on SSS-CORE written by the members of Hiraki Laboratory are available here. Classification of papers is as follows.

• General ideas of SSS-CORE
• MBCF (Memory-Based Communication Facilities)
• RCOP (Remote Communication OPtimizer), and UDSM (User-level Distributed Shared Memory) and ADSM (Asymmetric Distributed Shared Memory)
• Scheduling strategy
• SSS-Server

Demonstrations

The following programs were developed to demonstrate the high performance of SSS-CORE.

• Multitasking execution of parallel applications
• Ray tracing
• Mandelbrot set visualization
• Movies on flying cubes
• Multi-screen movie

Research Plan for the Future

We are now developing SSS-CORE Ver. 2.3/Ver. 1.3. They implement `Free Market Mechanism' scheduling (*1) and migration functionality. With these functions, you can either stop any node for maintenance or add a new machine to a cluster for build-up, even while running the system and applications.
After developing Ver. 2.3/Ver. 1.3, we are planning to develop the PC version of SSS-CORE. Separately from the whole SSS-CORE system, MBCF is being ported to PC Linux.
The first goal of SSS-CORE was to make researches on the ideals of fundamental functionalities of an operating system. Therefore SSS-CORE does not have additional functionalities for a user (especially for a novice user) such as a Graphical User Interface. We are now porting X Window System, which is widely used on UNIX.
In addition to the above ongoing works, we are planning to strengthen the functionalities of security (e.g. encrypted communication) and distributed processing. These functionalities are essential for a server operating system.

(*1) The study of 'Free Market Mechanism' scheduling is supported by Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST).

Official Mascot

This cat is the official mascot of SSS-CORE. It is named `Manekikko'. It was designed from a Japanese lucky cat `manekineko'.