Formation of a multiprocessor study group within POSIX

[Bob Knighten]

	    Formation of a multiprocessor study group within POSIX

     At its meeting on Thursday, July 13, 1989, the Standards Executive
Committee (SEC) of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on
Operating Systems approved formation of an informal study group on
multiprocessors as part of the POSIX effort.

The first meeting of the multiprocessor study group will be October 16-20,
1989 in Brussels, Belgium.  This first meeting will be conducted as part of
the P1003.10 supercomputer working group.

A working group will be established with the purpose of drafting an
Application Environment Profile for multiprocessors within the POSIX
framework.  As a start, the following items would likely be included:

      (i)    Parallel processing model
      (ii)   Programming interface
      (iii)  Kernel architecture
	       (a) virtual memory
	       (b) multi-threading of kernel
	       (c) support for added kernel services
      (iv)   Commands/utilities
	       (a) user
	       (b) system administration
      (v)    Thread-safe libraries
      (vi)   Parallelizing existing libraries
      (vii)  Language bindings
      (viii) Real-time multiprocessors
      (ix)   Multiprocessor support for Transaction Processing
      (x)    Network interfaces for parallel programs on multiprocessors

Hopefully the work of this group will be closely coordinated with the Unix
International Working Group on multiprocessing, the Open Software Foundation
Special Interest Group on multiprocessing and with X3H5 (Parallel Processing
Constructs for High Level Programming Languages), the X3 group on parallel
programming initiated by the Parallel Computing Forum, as well as with the
many relevant 1003 working groups.

If you are interested in participating in this study group, please contact

   Bob Knighten                        
   Encore Computer Corp.
   257 Cedar Hill St.        
   Marlborough, MA 01752
   (508) 460-0500 ext. 2626

   Internet:  knighten at encore.com
   Usenet:    {bu-cs,decvax,necntc,talcott}!encore!knighten