The Multicore Evolution and Operating Systems

Talk by Prof. Frans Kaashoek, MIT, at TechVista 2012, Kolkata, India.
Anstract:

Multicore chips with hundreds of cores will likely be available soon. Although many applications have significant inherent parallelism (e.g., mail servers), their scalability on many cores can be limited by the underlying operating system. In five years, will we need a new operating system design to support such applications or can we find new techniques that allow existing designs to scale well? This talk puts that question in the broader context of how to find exciting research problems in computer systems and explores the question based on our research with scaling system-intensive applications on Linux.

Joint work with: S. Boyd-Wickizer, A. Clements, Y. Mao, A. Pesterev, R. Morris, and N. Zeldovich