Application Specific Operating Systems MAE Document

Several application domains have suffered from the general policies dictated by general purpose OS (GPOS), like the UNIX system [1]. Therefore, since the early 1990s, OS community realized the need for customizable OS, where the application performance can be enhanced by customizing the OS for a certain application. However, since then, no one acceptable system was widely used. In this report, we present our research quest of investigating the feasibility of automatically generating an application specific operating system (ASOS) by customizing GPOS for scientific applications. Our four focus areas in this study are: customizable OS, scientific applications’ characterization, Profiling and optimizing techniques, virtual machine monitors.