OS innovator Maccabe
skates into Oak Ridge
Posted March 20, 2009
As an avid hockey player for most of his life, Arthur Bernard “Barney” Maccabe recognizes the vital role of speed and agility in a team’s success on the ice and at work, where he and colleagues design core software for supercomputers.
Maccabe is a pioneer in “lightweight” operating systems – the basic instructions that enable massively parallel computers to solve problems by breaking them apart and parceling them out to thousands of processors. Each executes its part of the algorithm simultaneously, a process known as scaling, to reach a solution more quickly than a single processor could.
After 27 years as a professor, researcher and administrator at the University of New Mexico, Maccabe (pronounced “muhCABE”) joined the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee early in 2009 as director of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division.
It took him just a few days to find the ice rink in Oak Ridge. A former player on the University of Arizona team, Maccabe most recently was part of an over-40 traveling team, the Albuquerque Chili Peppers. See sidebar.
Carrying a hockey stick was just Maccabe’s avocation while in New Mexico. On the job at the university, he and his group performed basic research in lightweight operating systems – operating systems stripped to a bare minimum of features. Full-featured, or “heavyweight” operating systems (think Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X) include many components that may work well on single-processor computers, but can inhibit scaling on large systems.
Lightweight kernels: a brief history
Maccabe has collaborated with researchers at Sandia National Laboratory for the past 20 years on the first lightweight kernels (central operating system components) to manage communication between hardware and software for some of the world’s largest and fastest supercomputers, including the first system capable of a teraflops – a trillion operations a second.
