Hobbes: composition and virtualization as the foundations of an extreme-scale OS/R

Abstract

This paper describes our vision for Hobbes, an operating system and runtime (OS/R) framework for extreme-scale systems. The Hobbes design explicitly supports application composition, which is emerging as a key approach for applications to address scalability and power concerns anticipated with coming extreme-scale architectures. We make use of virtualization technologies to provide the flexibility to support requirements of application components for different node-level operating systems and runtimes, as well as different mappings of the components onto the hardware. We describe the architecture of the Hobbes OS/R, how we will address the cross-cutting concerns of power/energy, scheduling of massive levels of parallelism, and resilience. We also outline how the "users" of the OS/R (programming models, applications, and tools) influence the design.