Seminar HPC Trends Winter Term 2017/2018 New Operating System Concepts for High Performance Computing Fabian Dreer Ludwig-Maximilians Universit¨atM¨unchen
[email protected] January 2018 Abstract 1 The Impact of System Noise When using a traditional operating system kernel When running large-scale applications on clusters, in high performance computing applications, the the noise generated by the operating system can cache and interrupt system are under heavy load by greatly impact the overall performance. In order to e.g. system services for housekeeping tasks which is minimize overhead, new concepts for HPC OSs are also referred to as noise. The performance of the needed as a response to increasing complexity while application is notably reduced by this noise. still considering existing API compatibility. Even small delays from cache misses or interrupts can affect the overall performance of a large scale In this paper we study the design concepts of het- application. So called jitter even influences collec- erogeneous kernels using the example of mOS and tive communication regarding the synchronization, the approach of library operating systems by ex- which can either absorb or propagate the noise. ploring the architecture of Exokernel. We sum- Even though asynchronous communication has a marize architectural decisions, present a similar much higher probability to absorb the noise, it is project in each case, Interface for Heterogeneous not completely unaffected. Collective operations Kernels and Unikernels respectively, and show suffer the most from propagation of jitter especially benchmark results where possible. when implemented linearly. But it is hard to anal- yse noise and its propagation for collective oper- ations even for simple algorithms.