Pulse: An Ada-Based Distributed Operating System

The last few years have seen the increasing use of distributed systems, the emergence of UNIX as a de facto industrial standard operating system and the appearance of Ada as a standard concurrent programming language. The PULSE Distributed Operating System attempts to take the best features of UNIX and apply them to a distributed environment using Ada as the implementation language. This book discusses the influence that Ada has had on the system's design, describes the structure of PULSE in detail and reports on the lessons learned from its construction. It is organised so that each major area is dealt with in a more or less self-contained chapter. The reader is taken from high-level principles down into the implementation of the system with actual measurements of its performance.