NICTA Embedded Systems Public Seminar
The Barrelfish OS for Heterogeneous Multicore Systems
Andrew Baumann, ETH Zurich.
Time/Venue
Thursday 18th December 2008, 11am
National ICT Australia Ltd, Level 1 Seminar Room West, 223 Anzac Parade (Building L5), Kensington NSW 2052
Abstract
Barrelfish is a new open-source operating system for heterogeneous multicore systems being developed at ETH Zurich, in conjunction with Microsoft Research Cambridge.
They seek to tackle two closely-related problems: scalability to many cores, and hardware diversity, which even in a single machine is increasing together with the available parallelism. Barrelfish treats a multicore machine more as a networked system than as a single, monolithic computer, using an OS architecture they term "Multikernel". Each core runs an independent kernel instance, with cross-core consistency provided by user-space tasks employing ideas from distributed systems.
They also apply knowledge-representation techniques to allow the OS and applications to reason about the richness of the hardware at runtime, and to control scheduling and resource allocation decisions.
This talk will discuss the implications of these ideas on the structure of an OS, and the current status and future directions of the system.