A Unified Operating System for Clouds and Manycore: fos

Abstract

Single chip processors with thousands of cores will be available in the next ten years and clouds of multicore processors afford the operating system designer thousands of cores today. Constructing operating systems for manycore and cloud systems face similar challenges. This work identifies these shared challenges and introduces our solution: a factored operating system (fos) designed to meet the scalability, faultiness, variability of demand, and programming challenges of OSâ s for single-chip thousand-core manycore systems as well as current day cloud computers. Current monolithic operating systems are not well suited for manycores and clouds as they have taken an evolutionary approach to scaling such as adding fine grain locks and redesigning subsystems, however these approaches do not increase scalability quickly enough. fos addresses the OS scalability challenge by using a message passing design and is composed out of a collection of Internet inspired servers. Each operating system service is factored into a set of communicating servers which in aggregate implement a system service. These servers are designed much in the way that distributed Internet services are designed, but provide traditional kernel services instead of Internet services. Also, fos embraces the elasticity of cloud and manycore platforms by adapting resource utilization to match demand. fos facilitates writing applications across the cloud by providing a single system image across both future 1000+ core manycores and current day Infrastructure as a Service cloud computers. In contrast, current cloud environments do not provide a single system image and introduce complexity for the user by requiring different programming models for intra- vs inter-machine communication, and by requiring the use of non-OS standard management tools.