Resource Management in the Tessellation Manycore OS

Tessellation is a manycore OS predicated on two central ideas: Space-Time Partitioning (STP) and Two-Level Scheduling. STP exploits novel hardware and software mechanisms to provide performance isolation and strong partitioning of resources (such as cores or memory bandwidth) among interacting software components, called “Cells”. Two-Level Scheduling separates global decisions about the allocation and distribution of resources to Cells from application-specific scheduling of resources within Cells. We describe Tessellation’s Cell model, its resource allocation architecture, and basic policies for resource management. We present results from our prototype running on both an 8-core Nehalem machine and an FPGA-emulation of a 64-core machine with memorybandwidth partitioning hardware.