Systems Software for emerging non-traditional hardware topologies
Please join us for our forthcoming Atlas Talk (online) in Computer Science on Wednesday 9 March at 14:00 – speaker Antonio BARBALACE
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https://zoom.us/j/91551538062
Meeting ID: 915 5153 8062
Passcode: 190510
Abstract:
Today’s computer hardware is increasingly heterogeneous, including several special purpose and reconfigurable accelerators that sit along with the central processing unit (CPU). Emerging platforms go a step further including processing units (CPUs and/or accelerators), in the storage, network, and memory hierarchies (near data processing architectures). Therefore, introducing hardware topologies that didn’t exist before — non-traditional, e.g., a single computer with multiple diverse CPUs, other than accelerators.
Existent, traditional, systems software has been designed and developed with the assumption that a single computer hosts a single CPU complex. Therefore, there is one operating system running per computer, and software is compiled to run on a specific CPU complex. However, within emerging platforms this doesn’t apply anymore because every different CPU complex requires its own operating system and applications, which are not compatible between each other, making a single platform look like a distributed system – even when CPU complexes are tightly coupled. This makes programming hard and hinders all of a set of performance optimizations. Therefore, this talk argues that new systems software is needed to better support emerging non-traditional hardware topologies and introduces new operating system and compiler design(s) to achieve easier programming, and full system performance exploitation
Speaker
Antonio BARBALACE
Role: Associate Professor
Organisation: University of Edinburgh
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