Abstract
The complexity of future supercomputers will increase on their path to exascale systems and beyond. System software has to adapt to this complexity to simplify the development of scalable applications. A small, scalable, adaptable, and highly tuned kernel would be best suitable for high-performance computing if common programming interfaces (e.g., MPI, OpenMP ) were still supported. Similar characteristics are likewise important in the cloud computing domain. Here, small environments are desirable as well since the applications mostly run in virtual machines which may influence each other, i.e., the activity of a virtual machine on a neighboring core may decrease the performance due to issues such as cache contamination—which is commonly referred to as the noisy neighbor problem. In addition, small environments reduce the attack vector which is an important aspect for cloud providers. In this chapter, we present the operating system HermitCore, combining two different kernel designs for high performance and cloud computing. HermitCore is a multi-kernel providing the scalability of a lightweight kernel and the flexibility of a full-weight kernel. HermitCore can also be run as a unikernel. These are specialized, single-address-space machine images constructed using library operating systems. This approach supports the removal of obsolete code and allows the compiler to perform link-time optimizations of the whole software stack including the library operating system itself. We show that HermitCore promises excellent performance and propose a novel checkpoint/restart technique for unikernels.
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Notes
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Uhyve is an acronym for Unikernel Hypervisor.
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The compiler flags -O3 -march=native -mtune=native are used.
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Per default, we used 64 KiB as the shared segment size.
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Acknowledgements
This research and development was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under Grant 01IH16010C (Project ENVELOPE).
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Lankes, S., Pickartz, S., Breibart, J. (2019). HermitCore. In: Gerofi, B., Ishikawa, Y., Riesen, R., Wisniewski, R.W. (eds) Operating Systems for Supercomputers and High Performance Computing. High-Performance Computing Series, vol 1. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6624-6_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6624-6_20
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