1.0 Introduction

1.1 About this manual

This manual is for programmers working with Legion. It contains information on two Legion-compatible languages (Mentat and Fortran), the Legion libraries, resource management, implementing new Legion objects, and Legion core objects.

This symbol, which appears next to some of the sections in this manual, indicates that, for the time being, the information in the section is incomplete. Future versions of this manual will include full documentation of these changes. Users can contact the Legion Group with any questions or problem with these sections (please see Getting help).

There are four Legion manuals, each aimed at a specific type of user, that can be consulted for more information. The others are are:

• Basic User Manual: introductory information about the system.
• System Administrator Manual: information and documentation for administrators of Legion systems, including installing and running Legion, configuring security features, resource management, and managing a Legion system.
• Reference Manual: detailed information about specific elements of the Legion system.

There are also man pages for all Legion commands included with the system files and on-line tutorials on the Legion web site (http://legion.virginia.edu).

1.2 Style conventions

The manuals at times refer to path names in Unix directory space and in Legion context space. To avoid confusion, the following style conventions are used throughout Legion documentation:

• Unix, DOS, and local path names appear in a serif typeface.
• Context path names appear in courier typeface.
• Functions, method names, parameters, flags, command-line utilities (such as rm, cp, and legion_ls), and context path names appear in fixed typeface.

1.3 About Legion

Legion is an object-based grid operating system at the University of Virginia intended to support the construction of wide-area virtual computers, or metasystems, which will allow users to work on a variety of geographically distributed, high-performance machines and workstations. Legion is designed to support large degrees of parallelism in application code and to manage the complexities of the physical system for the user in order to take advantage of this enormous physical infrastructure.

legion@Virginia.edu
http://legion.virginia.edu/