Building an operating system from the ground up
(page 2 of 2)
This multi-institutional research team wants the best of both worlds: an OS that doesn’t compromise system speed, but offers all the components a programmer might want for a custom computer simulation. Sandia researchers often run these kinds of large-scale simulations, such as models of metal stresses in a fire environment or turbulent reacting flow in internal combustion engines.
The team first wrestled with the trade-off of running a “full-featured” OS such as Linux versus a “lightweight” OS such as Catamount, which was built to run on the Cray XT3. The challenge is to maintain Catamount’s scalability (the capacity to run well on an ever-greater number of processors) and performance while allowing for additional features as needed. The goal is to build a framework for operating systems appropriate for a wider variety of parallel computing architectures and applications.
“The idea is to understand the performance issues when you take an operating system like Catamount, break it into components and then put those components back together,” Brightwell says.
The researchers first defined the crucial components – memory management, networking and scheduling – then built the elements as part of a flexible generic framework that can be customized based on specific project needs. The system has been demonstrated on a small number of platforms: the Xen hardware virtualization environment, the PowerPC architecture, and the Cray XT3.
“We’ve got the framework now, and we are in the middle of determining what the performance implications of the framework will be,” Brightwell says. “In theory, we envision our framework to be sophisticated enough for a programmer to be able to look at a menu of services and say, Here are the services that I want, build me an operating system that gives me those, and only those, services.’”
Long-term plans for Config-OS include building a library of components that will allow programmers to choose which services they need for a given simulation, and collaborating with application developers to test and debug the system.
« Previous 1 | 2 | Print
