"The Multikernel: A New OS Architecture for Scalable Multicore Systems”, co-authored by Timothy Roscoe receives

Timotha Roscoe received the external pageSIGOPS Hall of Famecall_made award for the paper "external pageThe Multikernel: A New OS Architecture for Scalable Multicore Systemscall_made” (Andrew Baumann, Paul Barham, Pierre-Evariste Dagand, Tim Harris, Rebecca Isaacs, Simon Peter, Timothy Roscoe, Adrian Schüpbach, and Akhilesh Singhania) published in 2009 in Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 22nd symposium on Operating systems principles.

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Abstract: 

Commodity computer systems contain more and more processor cores and exhibit increasingly diverse architectural tradeo s, in- cluding memory hierarchies, interconnects, instruction sets and variants, and IO configurations. Previous high-performance com- puting systems have scaled in specific cases, but the dynamic nature of modern client and server workloads, coupled with the impossi- bility of statically optimizing an OS for all workloads and hardware variants pose serious challenges for operating system structures. We argue that the challenge of future multicore hardware is best met by embracing the networked nature of the machine, rethinking OS architecture using ideas from distributed systems. We investi- gate a new OS structure, themultikernel, that treats the machine as a network of independent cores, assumes no inter-core sharing at the lowest level, and moves traditional OS functionality to a distributed system of processes that communicate via message-passing. We have implemented a multikernel OS to show that the ap- proach is promising, and we describe how traditional scalability problems for operating systems (such as memory management) can be e ectively recast using messages and can exploit insights from distributed systems and networking. An evaluation of our prototype on multicore systems shows that, even on present-day machines, the performance of a multikernel is comparable with a conventional OS, and can scale better to support future hardware.