Operating System Mechanisms for Many-Core Systems

In the Phase I portion of this STTR, Securboration and renowned multicore expert Dr. Frank Mueller from North Carolina State University designed, developed, and benchmarked the proof-of-concept Pico-kernel Adaptive and Scalable Operating-system (PICASO) for many-core architectures. The Securboration Team took a scientific, experimentation-based approach to identifying and resolving shortcomings with existing Operating Systems (OS) design when applied to many (or multi)-core architectures. Based on these findings, the Team developed an innovative solution that uses sets of coordinated, interoperating micro-kernels and pico-kernels that communicate via distributed message passing. Each kernel resides on an individual core, and in a hierarchical fashion the micro-kernels'manage'adjacent sets of pico-kernels. The Team ran PICASO through the standardized NASA Advanced Supercomputing Parallel Benchmark (NPB) suite and compared the results with other multicore OS implementations based on shared memory and message passing. In comparison, PICASO showed significant performance increases in all metrics with minimal overhead as the number of cores scaled from two to the maximum available (sixty-four). PICASO's ability to maximize multicore performance has significant commercial potential for companies such as Facebook and Google who are seeking to optimize their performance cost.