Abstract
Hardware design in high-performance computing (HPC) is often highly experimental. Exploring new designs is difficult and time-consuming, requiring lengthy vendor cooperation. RISC-V is an open-source processor ISA that improves the accessibility of chip design, including the ability to do hardware/software co-design using open-source hardware and tools. Co-design allows design decisions to easily flow across the hardware/software boundary and influence future design ideas. However, new hardware designs require corresponding software to drive and test them. Conventional operating systems like Linux are massively complex and modification is time-prohibitive. In this paper, we describe our port of the Kitten lightweight kernel operating system to RISC-V in order to provide an alternative to Linux for conducting co-design research. Kitten's small code base and simple resource management policies are well matched for quickly exploring new hardware ideas that may require radical operating system modifications and restructuring. Our evaluation shows that Kitten on RISC-V is functional and provides similar performance to Linux for single-core benchmarks. This provides a solid foundation for using Kitten in future co-design research involving RISC-V.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of ROSS 2022 |
| Subtitle of host publication | International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers, Held in conjunction with SC 2022: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis |
| Publisher | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. |
| Pages | 11-17 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781665475662 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
| Event | 12th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers, ROSS 2022 - Dallas, United States Duration: Nov 13 2022 → Nov 18 2022 |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings of ROSS 2022: International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers, Held in conjunction with SC 2022: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis |
|---|
Conference
| Conference | 12th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers, ROSS 2022 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | Dallas |
| Period | 11/13/22 → 11/18/22 |
Funding
This article has been authored by an employee of National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC under Contract No. DE-NA0003525 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The employee owns all right, title and interest in and to the article and is solely responsible for its contents. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this article or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan https://www.energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a non-exclusive, paid up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of the manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. The DOE will provide public access to these results in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a non-exclusive, paid up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of the manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. The DOE will provide public access to these results in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725.
Keywords
- RISC-V
- co-design
- high performance computing
- operating system