Corey

I came across this excellent OSDI 08 paper by Robert Morris & team at MIT. They look into the widening gap between traditional system software and many-core hardware. Their approach is to zero on needlessly shared kernel fixtures and to seek-out application’s participation, for the application to sanction what really needs to be shared and amongst which things, no more and no less.

I fully resonate with the problem statement and the solution scope. We are actively moving from 8-core to 16-core servers and are stumbling precisely on these issues.  These days, I repeat myself that “what got you here won’t get you there”.  More of this journey in upcoming blog entries.

We often say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Their figure 2 is just brilliant. It really put my finger on the disparity in memory access timings among the 16 cores.