Silicon Graphics Inc says it is planning an enhanced version of Irix. It is based on Hive, a cellular version of 64-bit Irix 5.2 that Silicon Graphics is developing along with Stanford University (CI No 3,011). The company calls it Cellular Irix. The operating system divides services into partitionable cells that run independently on the system. Its main attributes are said to be fault containment and scalability. Fault-containment protects each cell from faults caused by other cells using a firewall, and a write-permission bit-vector associated with each page of memory discards pages when faults are detected. In Hive, shared memory is achieved by a unified file and virtual memory page cache across the cells, through a unified free page frame pool. Hive is designed to work with multiprocessor systems using Stanford’s own Flash processor, and systems are likely to start testing around December, with 100 processors, one in each node, according to Mendel Rosenblum, leader of the Hive research group at Stanford. He reckons Hive will eventually scale to thousands of processors. Silicon Graphics claims Cellular Irix will support more than 32 times the current number of available CPUs and more than 300 times the input-output bandwidth. The operating system includes an enhanced scheduler to ensure system resources, virtual address space of 1Tb and Silicon Graphics’s XFS journaled file system.
