Intel Making Progress On Their "mOS" Modified Linux Kernel Running Lightweight Kernels

[chuckatkins]

The connection of mOS to ASCI Red and IBM's CNK is that a good number of people in the mOS team have come from Sandia Labs and IBM where they have worked on these operating systems in the past. There is no code from these earlier projects in mOS, but we are hoping to carry forward some of the spirit that went into these earlier efforts.

In supercomputers with millions of cores it seems we don't need all of the OS functions on all these cores. That is where lightweight kernels come in.

I figured as much. The IPDPS paper is great; thank you for that! I appreciate the balanced approach you took in it of really giving a deep dive into the shortcommings of mOS. The entire project is of course very reminiscent of the BlueGene OS environments but those always kind of a PITA to deal with, largely because they were a one-off thing. It's almost like you said "Hey, the BlueGene OS stuff was cool, but it kinda sucked too. What if we made a thing like it that didn't suck?"

I expect this will be quite relevant on Fugaku since it follows the same many-core no-accelerator pattern with ARM as the KNL machines did. I'm curious though as to how these performance gains will translate to the upcoming DOE exsascale systems like Aurora, Frontier, and El Capitan which are all accelerator based so the vast majority of memory and compute management is on the GPUs and possibly wouldn't really gain much from the optimized implementations in mOS running on the CPU. Guess you'll need to find out :-)

Really interesting work!

[rolf]

Thanks chuckatkins Fugaku runs another multi-kernel called McKernel. It is being developed by a team at RIKEN. We have collaborated with that team for five years and written papers together. The fundamental ideas of both mOS and McKernel are the same: Isolate some of the many cores available on a modern compute node and run a specialized kernel on them, tailored for a specific set of applications. The biggest difference between the two OSes is how we implemented them. mOS is compiled into the Linux kernel while McKernel is a stand-alone lightweight kernel. A kernel module establishes communication between McKernel and Linux, while in mOS we get that for free. Both approaches have pros and cons.
Accelerators are indeed a conundrum ;-) But even there, there might be things that we can do on the host side to help out. Particularly for applications that also make use of the host side capabilities, or don't benefit greatly from being offloaded.

[cyring]

Mercure Operating System