Principal Investigator Anant Agarwal
Project Website http://groups.csail.mit.edu/carbon/?page_id=39
Factored Operating System (fos) is a new operating system targeting multicore, manycore, and cloud computing systems with scalability as the primary design constraint, where space sharing replaces time sharing to increase scalability.
In fos, each operating system service is factored into a set of communicating servers which in aggregate implement a system service. These servers are designed much in the way that distributed Internet services are designed, but instead of providing high level Internet services, these servers provide traditional kernel services and replace traditional kernel data structures in a factored, spatially distributed manner. fos replaces time sharing with space sharing. In other words, fos’s servers are bound to distinct processing cores and by doing so do not fight with end user applications for implicit resources such as TLBs and caches.
fos’s system servers communicate via message passing and as such can be distributed across multicore, manycore, clusters, and computational clouds.