The Case for VOS: The Vector Operating System

Operating systems research for many-core systems has recently focused its efforts on supporting the scalability of OS-intensive applications running on increasingly parallel hardware. Lost amidst the march towards this parallel future is efficiency: perfectly parallel software may saturate the parallel capabilities of the host system, but in doing so can waste hardware resources. This paper describes the authors' motivation for the Vector OS, a design inspired by vector processing systems that provides efficient parallelism. The Vector OS organizes and executes requests for operating system resources through "Vector" interfaces that operate on vectors of objects.