Faculty Candidate Seminar
Unleashing Hardware Potential through Better OS Abstractions
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Datacenter workloads have demanding performance requirements, including the
simultaneous need for high throughput, low tail latency, and high server
utilization. While modern hardware is compatible with these goals, modern
operating systems remain a bottleneck. Better OS abstractions could
significantly improve performance, yet deploying these abstractions has become
intractable given the size and complexity of today's systems.
I will first discuss Dune, a kernel extension that allows OS developers to
sidestep software and hardware complexity by running an OS within an ordinary
Linux process. With Dune, developers can both access the capabilities of raw
hardware and fall back on the functionality of a full Linux environment where
convenient. I will then discuss IX and Shinjuku, two generations of new
datacenter-focused operating systems that were enabled by Dune. IX provides a
novel system call interface that greatly improves network throughput without
sacrificing latency. For example, IX improves Memcached's TCP throughput by 5x
over Linux. Shinjuku, an ongoing research effort, aims to significantly increase
CPU utilization through a centralized approach to intra-server load balancing.
Adam Belay is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University,
where he is a member of the Secure Computer Systems Group and the Multiscale
Architecture and Systems Team. Previously, he worked on storage virtualization
at VMware Inc. and contributed substantial power management code to the Linux
Kernel project. Adam's research area is operating systems and networking. Much
of his work has focused on restructuring computer systems so that developers can
more easily reach the full performance potential of hardware. Adam has received
a Stanford Graduate Fellowship, a VMware Graduate Fellowship, and an OSDI Jay
Lepreau Best Paper Award.