Title: Quad-core Catamount and R&D in Multi-core Lightweight Kernels

Speaker: Kevin Pedretti, Sandia National Laboratories

Date/Time: Thursday, April 10 at 2:00 pm

Location: CSRI Building, Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: ASC capability supercomputers are massively complex, both in software and hardware.  General-purpose operating systems have grown so complicated that they significantly impede the innovation that will be necessary to take full advantage of future multi-core architectures, which are likely to incorporate heterogeneous and hierarchical computing elements.  This talk focuses on the compute node operating system and the work Sandia is doing to keep it simple, efficient, and functional.  The case will be made that general-purpose operating systems, even slimmed down ones, add unnecessary complexity to the system and are detrimental to performance.
   
Two of our parallel efforts will be presented.  The first will be an overview of the development project to add support for quad-core processors to the Catamount lightweight kernel (LWK) operating system that runs on Cray XT systems.  Catamount is the latest in a series of specialized HPC operating systems that are descendant from SUNMOS, a LWK developed by Sandia and the University of New Mexico in 1990 for the 1024 processor nCube-2 system. Quad-core Catamount results from application testing on a Cray XT4 system will be presented.
   
The second portion of the talk will discuss our effort to create a new open source LWK that addresses short-comings of previous implementations and is well-suited for use in multi-core systems.  This LWK is heavily based on Linux, but rewinds it to a much earlier design point.  Unnecessary complexity such as demand paging has been replaced by simpler mechanisms.  Enough of the Linux Application Binary Interface (ABI) is implemented to support HPC applications that are built with standard toolchains.  Additionally, work is underway to support more full-featured guest operating systems through a simple hypervisor.

CSRI POC: Jim Ang, (505) 844-0068