For Extreme Parallelism, Your OS Is Sooooo Last-Millennium

;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution

For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.

Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.

As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.

High-performance computing has been on an inexorable march from gigascale to tera- and petascale, with many researchers now actively contemplating exascale (1018, or a million trillion operations per second) systems. This progression is being accelerated by the rapid increase in multi- and many-core processors, which allow even greater opportunities for parallelism. Such densities, though, give rise to a new cohort of challenges, such as containing system software overhead, dealing with large numbers of schedulable entities, and maintaining energy efficiency.

We are studying software and processor-architectural features that will allow us to achieve these goals. We believe that exascale operation will require significant out of the box thinking, specifically in terms of the role of operating systems and system software. In this article, we describe some of our research into how these goals can be achieved.

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For Extreme Parallelism, Your OS Is Sooooo Last-Millennium

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NETWORKED SYSTEMS