Operating Systems Support for Advanced Programming Languages
As machines grow in scale and complexity, techniques to make the most effective use of network, memory, and processor resources will also become increasingly important. Programming models that rely on one-sided communication or global address space support have demonstrated advantages for productivity and performance, but they are most effective when used with proper OS support. We propose to develop OS and runtime support for programming models like UPC, GA, Charm++, and HPCS languages, which rely on one-sided communication. Rather than a full OS model, we envision applications bundled with only the necessary OS functions linked in to the application in user space -- relying on the hypervisor for protaction, resource sharing, and mangagement of Quality of Service guarantees. Our services will include support for remote reads and writes to memory, along with remote active message handlers, which are essential for support of fast noncontiguous memory operations, atomic operations, and event-driven applications.