Timothy Roscoe is a Professor in the Systems Group of the Computer
Science Department at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology. He received a PhD from the Computer Laboratory of the
University of Cambridge, where he was a principal designer and builder
of the Nemesis operating system, as well as working on the Wanda
microkernel and Pandora multimedia system. After three years building
web-based collaboration systems at a startup company in North
Carolina, Mothy joined Sprint's Advanced Technology Lab in Burlingame,
California, working on application hosting platforms and networking
monitoring. Mothy joined Intel Research at Berkeley in April 2002 as
a principal architect of PlanetLab, an open, shared platform for
developing and deploying planetary-scale services. In September 2006
he spent four months as a visiting researcher in the Embedded and
Real-Time Operating Systems group at National ICT Australia in Sydney,
before joining ETH Zurich in January 2007. His current research
interests include operating systems for heterogeneous multicore
systems, and network architectures for ubiquitous computing.

AG 1, AG 2, AG 3, AG 4, AG 5, SWS, RG1, MMCI   Info

Expert Audience

English

60 Minutes

Saarbrücken

In this talk, I'll argue for sophisticated automated reasoning
capabilities as a first-class OS service. With such a service, one
can delegate many OS policy decisions and calculations to a component
which is highly flexible, expressive, and dynamic, providing
considerable advantages of hard-coding such functionality in C or
scripts. Modern operating systems face several engineering
challenges: hardware is increasingly complex, increasingly diverse,
and evolving rapidly. This, combined with parallel workloads having
complex performance interactions with hardware make it hard to build a
simple OS kernel which delivers good performance for a variety of
platforms and workloads.

As a first step, we decided to tackle this head-on by building a
reasoning engine as a first class service (the "System Knowledge
Base") in the Barrelfish OS, borrowing ideas from such fields as
knowledge representation, constraint satisfaction, logic programming,
and optimization. Doing so was not without problems, but we found it
highly convenient in a number of widely different application areas -
for example PCI programming, process coordination, spatial scheduling,
and message routing. I'll discuss several of these, and how the
structure of the OS as a whole changes when a facility like the SKB is
available Finally, I'll talk about some future directions, in
particularly with embedded devices such as SoCs.

Brigitta Hansen

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