IAS Seminar "Building an Exascale OS"

Currently, high performance systems are mostly used by splitting them into fixedsize partitions which are completely owned and operated by applications. Hardware architecture designs strive to remove the operating system from the critical
path, for example using techniques such as RDMA and busy waiting for minimizing communication latencies. Furthermore, applications take over traditional operating system functionality such as balancing load over resources.

In exascale computing, new challenges and opportunities may put an end to that mode of operation. These developments include applications too complex and too dynamic to do application-level balancing and hardware too diverse to maintain an application-level view of a fixed number of reliable and predictable resources.

The talk will discuss operating system building blocks of the ”FFMK OS“, which aims to overcome these exascale challenges. These building blocks include schedulers, microkernels, library OSes, virtualization, execution time predictors, and gossip algorithms. They need to be combined into a coherent architecture and some of them will be exposed to applications through APIs.

Anyone interested is cordially invited to participate in this seminar.