OS Comparison on the Single-Chip Cloud Computer

Motivation:

The Intel Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is a research prototype into many-core computer architectures and one of the first publicly available non cache coherent computers, featuring 48 IA-32 cores on a single chip.

The Barrelfish message-passing operating system is a natural fit for this architecture and a working prototype implementation already exists. A different approach is to treat the chip as a datacenter and run 48 individual operating systems on it, which has been demonstrated by Intel using 48 Linux kernels.

We are interested in a performance and feature analysis, comparing Barrelfish vs. 48x Linux on the SCC. What are the potential features offered by either approach, what are the performance trade-offs and why are they there?

Goals:

• Conceive interesting feature comparison points.
• Develop and run microbenchmarks on both Barrelfish and Linux, comparing features in detail.
• Port and run applications on Barrelfish and Linux, comparing application-level performance and features.
• Report on the differences and provide an analysis of the reasons for those differences.

Technologies:

C, IA-32 hardware architecture, operating systems, Linux

Contact:

Simon Peter, Timothy Roscoe