Balazs Gerofi

“An Update to the IHK/McKernel Lightweight Multi-kernel Operating System”

Dr. Balazs Gerofi, Research Scientist

System Software Research Team, RIKEN, Japan

Abstract

RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computation Science has been leading the development of Japan’s next generation flagship supercomputer, the successor of the K. Part of this effort is to design and develop a system software stack that suits the needs of future extreme scale computing. IHK/McKernel is a multi-kernel operating system that runs Linux with a light-weight kernel (LWK) side-by-side on compute nodes with the primary motivation of providing scalable, consistent performance for large scale HPC simulations, but at the same time to retain a fully Linux compatible execution environment. We have already demonstrated McKernel’s superior performance compared to Linux on a number of HPC workloads. This talk will provide an update on recent advances of the project. We will discuss integration of multi-kernels with application containers, a crucial technology towards supporting a converged HPC/Big Data/Machine learning software stack. Furthermore, we provide an overview of PicoDriver, a novel device driver framework that allows unmodified Linux device drivers to be enhanced in a multi-kernel OS via adapting the fast-path driver code to LWK internals.

Wednesday 7 February 2018 – 10:45 am – 11:15 am

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Bio

Dr. Balazs Gerofi is an expert in system software and parallel / distributed computing. In particular Balasz is interested in operating systems (kernel architectures for many-core CPUs, memory management, file systems), HPC (parallel and distributed I/O, resiliency), virtualisation, and fault tolerant computing (replication, checkpoint-restart, message-logging).