A Container-Based Approach to OS Specialization for Exascale Computing
Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2015 papers
Abstract
Future exascale systems will impose several conflicting challenges on the operating system (OS) running on the compute nodes of such machines. On the one hand, the targeted extreme scale requires the kind of high resource usage efficiency that is best provided by lightweight OSes. At the same time, substantial changes in hardware are expected for exascale systems. Compute nodes are expected to host a mix of general-purpose and special-purpose processors or accelerators tailored for serial, parallel, compute-intensive, or I/O-intensive workloads. Similarly, the deeper and more complex memory hierarchy will expose multiple coherence domains and NUMA nodes in addition to incorporating nonvolatile RAM. That expected workload and hardware heterogeneity and complexity is not compatible with the simplicity that characterizes high performance lightweight kernels. In this work, we describe the Argo Exascale node OS, which is our approach to providing in a single kernel the required OS environments for the two aforementioned conflicting goals. We resort to multiple OS specializations on top of a single Linux kernel coupled with multiple containers.
Related Papers
- → Trends in supercomputing: The European path to exascale(2010)55 cited
- → Modular Supercomputing and its Role in Europe’s Exascale Computing Strategy(2023)4 cited
- → First Supercomputer Breaks Exascale Barrier, with More Expected Soon(2023)6 cited
- Paving the Road towards Pre-Exascale Supercomputing(2014)
- → Will China attain exascale supercomputing in 2020?(2019)2 cited