An operating system for multicore and clouds: Mechanisms and implementation
Cloud computers and multicore processors are two emerging classes of computational hardware that have the potential to provide unprecedented compute capacity to the average user. In order for the user to effectively harness all of this computational power, operating systems (OSes) for these new...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
Association for Computing Machinery
2011
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62570 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7015-4262 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6057-9769 |
| Summary: | Cloud computers and multicore processors are two emerging classes
of computational hardware that have the potential to provide unprecedented
compute capacity to the average user. In order for the
user to effectively harness all of this computational power, operating
systems (OSes) for these new hardware platforms are needed.
Existing multicore operating systems do not scale to large numbers
of cores, and do not support clouds. Consequently, current
day cloud systems push much complexity onto the user, requiring
the user to manage individual Virtual Machines (VMs) and deal
with many system-level concerns. In this work we describe the
mechanisms and implementation of a factored operating system
named fos. fos is a single system image operating system across
both multicore and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud systems.
fos tackles OS scalability challenges by factoring the OS
into its component system services. Each system service is further
factored into a collection of Internet-inspired servers which communicate
via messaging. Although designed in a manner similar to
distributed Internet services, OS services instead provide traditional
kernel services such as file systems, scheduling, memory management,
and access to hardware. fos also implements new classes
of OS services like fault tolerance and demand elasticity. In this
work, we describe our working fos implementation, and provide
early performance measurements of fos for both intra-machine and
inter-machine operations. |
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