Date: November 11, 1999
Time: Noon
Place: Wean Hall 8220

Speaker: Orran Krieger, IBM T.J. Watson

The K42 research operating system

Abstract:
K42 is a new Linux-compatible research operating system being developed at IBM T.J. Watson. We believe that 64-bit multiprocessors will dominate the server market in the near future, and that substantially better performance and scalability can be achieved if the operating system is designed from scratch for these platforms. Given that the fundamental structure of the OS is new, we have the opportunity to address challenges not dealt with by existing operating systems, and to incorporate software engineering and operating system innovations that have been difficult to retrofit into existing systems. For example, the system allows for application-specific customization by: 1) implementing a great deal of functionality in user-level libraries that can be modified for an application, and 2) by adopting a novel technology, called building-block composition, that allows applications to specify how the OS services provided by the system servers and kernel are implemented. As another example, the system has a very high degree of modularity that makes it more portable, maintainable, and extensible than existing operating systems. In this talk we describe the basic architecture of K42, present micro-bechmark results that compare our multi-processor performance to existing commercial systems, and discuss our future goals and research directions.

Bio:
Orran Krieger is a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He received a BASc from the University of Ottawa in 1985, a MASc from the University of Toronto in 1989, and a PhD from the University of Toronto in 1994, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was one of the main architects and developers of the Hurricane and Tornado operating systems at the University of Toronto, and was heavily involved in the architecture and development of the Hector and NUMAchine shared-memory multiprocessors. Currently, he is project lead on the K42 operating system project at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His research interests include operating systems, file systems, and computer architecture.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/