Design Challenges of Scalable Operating Systems for Many-Core Architectures

Computers will move from the multi-core reality of today to manycore. Instead of only a few cores on a chip, we will have thousands of cores available for use. This new architecture will force engineers to rethink OS design. It is the only way for operating systems to remain scalable even as the number of cores increases. Presented here are three design challenges of operating systems for many-core architectures: (1) Locks which do not scale, (2) poor locality offered by the traditional approach of sharing processor cores between application and OS and (3) no more cache coherent shared memory available to the OS. This elaboration discusses why these challenges impact scalability, introduces proposed solutions and evaluates them.