ZIH-Kolloquium "FFMK: A Fast and Fault-tolerant Microkernel-based Operating System for Exascale Computing"

FFMK: A Fast and Fault-tolerant Microkernel-based Operating System for Exascale Computing

The FFMK project designs, builds, and evaluates a system-software architecture to address the challenges expected for Exascale systems. These include runtime variability within applications, hardware performance variation, and operating system noise. Our operating system combines a small L4 microkernel to provide a low-noise execution environment and a full-blown general purpose operating system (Linux) for compatibility with existing HPC codes. The architecture is complemented by decentralized system management and checkpointing components. The talk will give an overview of the project, research done by the individual partners (including TU Dresden's operating systems group and ZIH), and how HPC systems at ZIH are used in the project, ranging from studying application behavior all the way down to bare-metal runs of an experimental operating system on Atlas and Taurus nodes."

Dr.-Ing. Carsten Weinhold is a member of the operating systems group at TU Dresden. His research started in microkernel-based operating systems and security architectures. In 2014, he defended his doctoral thesis on re-architecting a file system stack so as to isolate and better protect its security-critical functionality. He now applies the underlying idea of split code bases to HPC to ensure performance isolation and to reduce latency.