Parallel Architecture Hardware and General Purpose Operating System Co-design

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of co-designing hardware and software, especially operating systems, to fully leverage scalable parallelism for high-performance general purpose computing.

Contribution

It presents a conceptual framework and a sketch for a comprehensive, dynamic operating system designed to harmonize with a straightforward hardware architecture.

Findings

Highlights the necessity of hardware-software co-design for scalable parallelism

Proposes a new design approach for general purpose operating systems

Demonstrates how hardware and software design decisions can coexist and harmonize

Abstract

Because most optimisations to achieve higher computational performance eventually are limited, parallelism that scales is required. Parallelised hardware alone is not sufficient, but software that matches the architecture is required to gain best performance. For decades now, hardware design has been guided by the basic design of existing software, to avoid the higher cost to redesign the latter. In doing so, however, quite a variety of superior concepts is excluded a priori. Consequently, co-design of both hardware and software is crucial where highest performance is the goal. For special purpose application, this co-design is common practice. For general purpose application, however, a precondition for usability of a computer system is an operating system which is both comprehensive and dynamic. As no such operating system has ever been designed, a sketch for a comprehensive dynamic operating system is presented, based on a straightforward hardware architecture to demonstrate how design decisions regarding software and hardware do coexist and harmonise.