Processes and Resource Management in a Scalable Many-core OS∗

The emergence of many-core architectures necessitates a redesign of operating systems, including the interfaces they expose to an application. We propose a new operating system, called ROS, designed specifically to address many limitations of current OSs as we move into the many-core era. Our goals are (1) to provide better support for parallel applications for both high-performance and general purpose computing, and (2) to scale the kernel to thousands of cores. In this paper, we focus on the process model and resource management mechanisms of ROS. We expand the traditional process model to include the notion of a ‘many-core’ process designed to naturally support parallel applications. Additionally, we discuss our method of resource management that builds on the ideas of Space-Time Partitioning presented in our previous work [16]. Central to our design is the notion that protection domains should not necessarily be coupled with resource management, and resource partitioning is not necessarily coupled with resource allocation.