AM : Towards A Hardware Unix Accelerator for Many-Cores

Abstract

This article advocates the use of new architectural features commonly found in many-cores to replace the machine model underlying Unix-like operating systems. We present a general Abstract Many-core Machine Model (AM 3), a proof-of-concept implementation and first evaluation results in the context of an emerging many-core, hardware multi-threaded architecture without support for interrupts. Our proposed approach makes it possible to reuse off-the-shelf multithreaded/multiprocess software on massively parallel architectures, without need to change code to use custom programming models like CUDA or OpenCL. Benefits include higher hardware utilization, higher performance and higher energy efficiency for workloads common to general-purpose platforms, such as in datacenters and Clouds. The benefits also include simpler software control over the hardware platform, an enabling factor for the further evolution of parallel programming languages.