NWU-EECS-09-14 July 20 , 2009 Palacios and Kitten : High Performance Operating Systems For Scalable Virtualized and Native Supercomputing

Palacios and Kitten are new open source tools that enable applications, whether ported or not, to achieve scalable high performance on large machines. They provide a thin layer over the hardware to support both full-featured virtualized environments and native codebases. Kitten is an OS under development at Sandia that implements a lightweight kernel architecture to provide predictable behavior and increased flexibility on large machines, while also providing Linux binary compatibility. Palacios is a VMM that is under development at Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico. Palacios, which can be embedded into Kitten and other OSes, supports existing, unmodified applications and operating systems by using virtualization that leverages hardware technologies. We describe the design and implementation of both Kitten and Palacios. Our benchmarks show that they provide near native, scalable performance. Palacios and Kitten provide an incremental path to using supercomputer resources that is not performance-compromised. This project is made possible by support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) via grants CNS0709168, CNS-0707365, and the Department of Energy (DOE) via a subcontract from Oak Ridge National Laboratory on grant DE-AC05-00OR22725. Sandia National Laboratory has also provided assistance. Jack Lange was partially supported by a Symantec Research Labs Fellowship. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.