A short theory of multiprogramming

Author

Denning, Peter J.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., George Mason Univ., Fairfax, VA, USA

fYear

1995

fDate

18-20 Jan 1995

Firstpage

2

Lastpage

7

Abstract

Pressures to use virtual memory are growing. Newer versions of application programs are growing explosively; for example, Microsoft Word, around 400K bytes in Version 3, is 25 megabytes in Version 6. Servers such as those running Windows NT use multiprogramming to share memory among jobs. We may see soon a revival of interest in the theory of multiprogramming as server administrators discover and worry about preventing thrashing. It is therefore useful to unearth the findings of the 1970s, which may be of interest to operating system designers and system administrators of the 1990s. How might one construct a self-regulating multiprogrammed virtual memory operating system that delivers near-optimal throughput? Such a system would necessarily not thrash. This is a hard problem. It is not obvious which design possibilities help solve the problem and are efficient to implement

Keywords

multiprogramming; paged storage; resource allocation; virtual storage; multiprogramming; near-optimal throughput; operating system designers; self-regulating multiprogrammed virtual memory operating system; server administrators; system administrators; thrashing; Application software; Computer science; Databases; Job design; Microcomputers; Operating systems; Printing; Random access memory; Throughput; Virtual manufacturing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, 1995. MASCOTS '95., Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on

Conference_Location

Durham, NC

Print_ISBN

0-8186-6902-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MASCOT.1995.378718

Filename

378718