Over the past decade the architecture of modern computer hardware has changed dramatically. While today’s applications and operating systems are still struggling to efficiently and correctly handle multi-core CPUs, the development in hardware technology has already taken next major leaps. Software technology is again falling behind. Examples for open questions are:
- How to efficiently use non-uniform and disaggregated memory architectures?
- How to make use of ordinary CPU cores, integrated FPGA, GPGPUs, processing-in-memory (PIM), and AI accelerators in a coordinated manner?
- How to integrate persistent memory modules into our software systems?
- How to handle system-wide properties such as energy management or techniques to deal with aging of hardware components?
In the research project “MxKernel: A Bare-Metal Runtime System for Database Operations on Heterogeneous Many-Core Hardware” we have started out to tackle some of the aforementioned problems on the system software level. The talk will cover the motivation of this work, the proposed system software architecture, which is designed from scratch, and the results that we have already obtained.
However, it turned out that there are too many challenges for a single project to handle. Therefore, we have proposed the DFG priority program “Disruptive Memory Technologies”, which will start in summer 2022. The talk will also give an outlook on this program, which will be a coordinated effort to explore methods for efficient use of memory technologies that affect software development on multiple layers of the hardware/software stack.
Olaf Spinczyk leads the Embedded Software Systems Group at Osnabrück University since 2018. During his academic career he worked at the University of Magdeburg, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, and from 2007 to 2018 as a professor an Embedded System Software at TU Dortmund. His research covers a broad spectrum of topics in the context of system software construction with special focus on future embedded systems. Olaf is highly active in the German Computer Science Society (GI) and serves as speaker of the new DFG priority program 2377 “Disruptive Memory Technologies”.
Ansprechpartner:
Prof. Olaf Spinczyk
Arbeitsgruppe Eingebettete Softwaresysteme
Universität Osnabrück
Olaf(at)uos(dot)de
https://ess.cs.uni-osnabrueck.de
