Akaros

"Akaros is an operating system designed for many-core architectures and large-scale SMP systems. Our goals are to:

• Provide better support for parallel and high-performance applications
• Scale the operating system to a large number of cores

Akaros is based on a few related ideas:

• Allow processes to have control of their resources and "peer through" layers of virtualization
• Provision and guarantee resources to applications
• Treat parallel processes as a single native entity, which we call a many-core process (MCP)
• Structure the OS asymmetrically, where some cores specialize in management and system tasks

Akaros runs on x86 and SPARC V8 and is under active development as part of the AMP Lab project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Akaros is an open source, GPL-licensed operating system for manycore architectures. Its goal is to provide better support for parallel and high-performance applications in the datacenter. Unlike traditional OSs, which limit access to certain resources (such as cores), Akaros provides native support for application-directed resource management and 100% isolation from other jobs running on the system.

Although not yet integrated as such, it is designed to operate as a low-level node OS with a higher-level Cluster OS, such as Mesos, governing how resources are shared amongst applications running on each node. Its system call API and "Many Core Process" abstraction better match the requirements of a Cluster OS, eliminating many of the obstacles faced by other systems when trying to isolate simultaneously running processes. Moreover, Akaros’s resource provisioning interfaces allow for node-local decisions to be made that enforce the resource allocations set up by a Cluster OS. This can be used to simplify global allocation decisions, reduce network communication, and ultimately promote more efficient sharing of resources. There is limited support for such functionality on existing operating systems.

Akaros is still very young, but preliminary results show that processes running on Akaros have an order of magnitude less noise than on Linux, as well as fewer periodic signals, resulting in better CPU isolation. Additionally, its non-traditional threading model has been shown to outperform the Linux NPTL across a number of representative application workloads. This includes a 3.4x faster thread context switch time, competitive performance for the NAS parallel benchmark suite, and a 6% increase in throughput over nginx for a simple thread-based webserver we wrote. We are actively working on expanding Akaros's capabilities even further."

http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu/akaros-web/news.php

https://github.com/brho/akaros