Beyond Processor-centric Operating Systems

By the end of the decade, computing designs will shift from a processor-centric architecture to a memory-centric architecture. At rack scale, we can expect a large pool of non-volatile memory (NVM) that will be accessed by heterogeneous and decentralized compute resources. Such memory-centric architectures will present challenges that today’s processor-centric OSes may not be able to address. In this paper, we describe the characteristics and consequences of memory-centric architectures and propose a memory-centric OS design that moves traditional OS functionality outside of the compute node and closer to memory.