{"doi":"10.7916/d8t15bpt","title":"The Synthesis Kernel","abstract":"The Synthesis distributed operating system combines efficient kernel calls with a high-level, orthogonal interface. The key concept is the use of a code synthesizer in the kernel to generate specialized (thus short and fast) kernel routines for specific situations. We have three methods of synthesizing code: Factoring Invariants to bypass redundant computations; Collapsing Layers to eliminate unnecessary procedure calls and context switches; and Executable Data Structures to shorten data structure traversal time. Applying these methods, the kernel call synthesized to read /dev/mem takes about 15 microseconds on a 68020 machine. A simple model of computation called a synthetic machine supports parallel and distributed processing. The interface to synthetic machine consists of six operations on four kinds of objects. This combination of a high-level interface with the code synthesizer avoids the traditional trade-off in operating systems between powerful interfaces and efficient implementations.","journal":"Columbia Academic Commons (Columbia University)","year":1987,"id":770,"datarank":10.115352234494097,"base_score":4.919980925828125,"endowment":4.919980925828125,"self_citation_contribution":0.7379971388742189,"citation_network_contribution":9.377355095619878,"self_endowment_contribution":0.7379971388742189,"citer_contribution":9.377355095619878,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":136,"citer_count":120,"citers_with_citation_signal":108,"citers_with_endowment":108,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.0472,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"1987-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":7463,"name":"Henry Massalin","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":148,"name":"John P. A. Ioannidis","orcid":"0000-0003-3118-6859","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":7462,"name":"Calton Pu","orcid":"0000-0002-6616-8987","position":0,"is_corresponding":false}],"reference_count":9,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}