Exploiting Application-to-Architecture Dependencies for Designing Scalable OS

TL;DR

This paper introduces NetworkedOS, a scalable operating system that models application-to-architecture dependencies using network representations, enabling better process mapping and achieving significant performance improvements on multi-core systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-layer network model and an overlapping partitioning scheme for scalable OS design that exploits application-to-architecture dependencies.

Findings

Achieves up to 7.11x performance improvement over Linux on 128-core systems.

Reduces message transfer through overlapping partitioning.

Improves scalability by modeling dependencies with NetworkedOS.

Abstract

With the advent of hundreds of cores on a chip to accelerate applications, the operating system (OS) needs to exploit the existing parallelism provided by the underlying hardware resources to determine the right amount of processes to be mapped on the multi-core systems. However, the existing OS is not scalable and is oblivious to applications. We address these issues by adopting a multi-layer network representation of the dynamic application-to OS-to-architecture dependencies, namely the NetworkedOS. We adopt a compile-time analysis and construct a network representing the dependencies between dynamic instructions translated from the applications and the kernel and services. We propose an overlapping partitioning scheme to detect the clusters or processes that can potentially run in parallel to be mapped onto cores while reducing the number of messages transferred. At run time, processes are mapped onto the multi-core systems, taking into consideration the process affinity. Our experimental results indicate that NetworkedOS achieves performance improvement as high as 7.11x compared to Linux running on a 128-core system and 2.01x to Barrelfish running on a 64-core system.