John Kubiatowicz

University of California at Berkeley

Architecting Systems Software in a ManyCore World

 

Sometime around 2002, chip manufacturers started on a new path: doubling the number of cores per chip every 18 months.  Soon, consumer chips that could be classified as "manycore" -- with 64 or more cores -- will be commonplace. In this talk, I ask a few simple questions.  First, parallel processing has never succeeded as a mainstream technology, so why should it start now?  Second, can we use the arrival of ubiquitous parallel processing to fundamentally change the structure of systems software?

 

As a member of the Berkeley ParLAB, I will talk about ParLAB's vertical approach to the manycore programming challenge, including: high-level "motifs", autotuning, user-level runtime schedulers, spatial partitioning of resources, and QoS enforcing hardware.  I will present the design of our new operating system, called Tessellation, and our goals of responsiveness, realtime behavior, power efficiency, security, and correctness. I will argue that spatial partitions (which include gang-scheduled groups of processors, caches, and bandwidth resources) are a new operating system primitive that should replace processes as the basic unit of isolation, protection, and scheduling in the world of manycore systems.

 

4:15pm

B17 Upson Hall

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Refreshments at 3:45pm in the Upson 4th Floor Atrium

 

Computer Science

Colloquium

Fall 2009

www.cs.cornell.edu/events/colloquium