Solros: A Data-Centric Operating System Architecture For Heterogeneous Computing

We propose SOLROS-a new operating system architecture for heterogeneous systems that comprises fast host processors, slow but massively parallel co-processors, and fast I/O devices. A general consensus to fully drive such a hardware system is to have a tight integration among processors and I/O devices. Thus, in the SOLROS architecture, a co-processor OS (data-plane OS) delegates its services, specifically I/O stacks, to the host OS (control-plane OS). Our observation for such a design is that global coordination with system-wide knowledge (e.g., PCIe topology, a load of each co-processor) and the best use of heterogeneous processors is critical to achieving high performance. Hence, we fully harness these specialized processors by delegating complex I/O stacks on fast host processors, which leads to an efficient global coordination at the level of the control-plane OS.We developed SOLROS with Xeon Phi co-processors and implemented three core OS services: transport, file system, and network services. Our experimental results show significant performance improvement compared with the stock Xeon Phi running the Linux kernel. For example, SOLROS improves the throughput of file system and network operations by 19x and 7x, respectively. Moreover, it improves the performance of two realistic applications: 19x for text indexing and 2x for image search.