Inter-OS Communication on Highly Parallel Multi-Core Architectures

The next generation of large-scale machines for scientific computing will consist of a large number of nodes, each supporting many-core and multi-core processor con?gurations. On one hand, to extract performance from such machines, the operating system will have to be streamlined. On the other hand, the heterogeneity of these machines i.e., the variety of communication channels and computing elements will demand a larger set of OS services to achieve scalability. We believe that high-performance OS paravirtualization techniques, where different light-weight OS instances cooperate to provide the different OS services, can resolve this con?ict. Current research in paravirtualization aims to isolate OS instances for performance guarantees and security; in a high-performance computing setting, however, thread synchronization and inter-core communication within an application require that the memory is shared and coordinated to meet the application needs. In this paper, we present an approach to enabling efficient memory sharing and synchronization across OS instances running on a multi-core machine. Our performance evaluation shows that this approach allows native execution speeds in a paravirtualized setting, along with communication latencies that are lower than under any existing inter-OS communication mechanism.