Resource Management in a Multicore Operating System (original) (raw)

Trends in hardware design have led to processors with many cores on a single die, which present the opportunity for commodity computing to become increasingly parallel. These multicore architectures bring with them complex memory and cache hierarchies and processor interconnects. While the execution of batch parallel applications has been researched in the context of high-performance computing (HPC), commodity hardware is evolving at a faster pace than specialized supercomputers and applications are interactive, requiring fast system response times and the ability to react to ad-hoc workload changes. Leveraging and managing the existing potential for parallelization thus presents a difficult challenge for the development of both commodity operating systems and application programs, which have to keep up with hardware developments and present nimble solutions.