Abstract

Lightweight kernels (LWKs) are valuable operating system substrates in the high performance research community, but their deployment in new environments can be problematic as they are built for a set of highly specialized hardware that is typically only found in supercomputers and large-scale data centers. Developing and testing new features that leverage this hardware typically requires access to such a specialized system, and this access can be very expensive. The problem is particularly relevant for collaborators on the Kitten LWK project at Sandia National Laboratories that work on developing such features, but have difficulty deploying them on Kitten without access to Sandia’s specialized systems.
In this paper, we describe a virtual test architecture that allows development on the Kitten OS and runtime stacks without access to specialized hardware. Our solution, which leverages a modification to the Portals message passing interface, makes it simple for users to deploy a cluster of fully-featured Kitten LWK virtual machines in a way that is not limited by the underlying hardware. We also discuss some interesting software techniques that Kitten leverages, including various different uses of Portals, to support scalable, high performance networking for user-level applications.

Metadata

publication

CSRI SUMMER PROCEEDINGS 2013, 176, 2014

year

2014

publication date

2014/7/22

authors

BRIAN J KOCOLOSKI, KEVIN T PEDRETTI, RYAN E GRANT, DAVID DEBONIS

link

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=499bd8cd99daf330264813bcf38a375a9b32173d#page=182

resource_link

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=499bd8cd99daf330264813bcf38a375a9b32173d#page=182

journal

CSRI SUMMER PROCEEDINGS 2013

pages

176