Asynchronous Resource Management

As the organization of high-performance computers becomes more complex, the task of managing resources on them becomes increasingly difficult. The software layers which include the operating system, the runtime system, and the compiler must now map applications to machine architectures that consist of multiple CPUs, several layers of cache, deep memory hierarchies, file systems, interconnects, network interface cards, along with logical resources defined in the software system. To fully utilize all the available resources, software systems may use multiple sequential processes or threads that act on the passive resources of the system. This paper introduces a resource-centric, eventdriven model, where resources are active objects. We describe an algorithm that implements this model and show that this can significantly improve the performance of a wide variety of applications.