Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

Part I: System design: Technology and principles

Computer science is concerned with exploiting technology. A prime motivation for the study of software systems is to be able to exploit current and projected processing power, memory size and speed, storage capacity and communications bandwidth. CPU performance is increasing at about 35% per annum (for microprocessors), memory size quadruples every three years, disk performance grows relatively modestly at about 5% per annum. Local and wide area network bandwidths are increasing less uniformly but equally dramatically. The ten megabits per second local area network commonly used since the 1980s is being replaced by hundred megabit networks connected by gigabit backbones.

We are aiming to exploit ...