Abstract

Barrelfish is a new research operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK. We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi-core systems. We are motivated by two closely related trends in hardware design: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and, second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.

As part of the project we are revisiting the interface between applications and the operating system, in terms of how applications invoke system services, in terms of how applications express their resource requirements to the system, and in terms of how the system decides how to allocate cores and resources to the diverse mix of software running on a multi-core desktop system.

In this talk I’ll introduce the system architecture that we’re exploring with Barrelfish, and I’ll discuss some of the challenges and opportunities it offers in terms of how programmers write efficient, correct code.

Tim’s homepage: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/tharris/