Timothy Roscoe receives SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award

Professor Timothy Roscoe received the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award for the paper “The Multikernel: A New OS Architecture for Scalable Multicore Systems”, which he co-authored in 2009. Presented at the 2009 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), the paper synthesized several ideas from microkernels to build a highly scalable multiprocessor operating system. This resulted in Barrelfish, a new research operating system which rethinks the structure of operating systems for hardware of the future. The Hall of Fame Award was announced on November 5 in the ACM SIGOPS Award Ceremony at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation.

Commodity computer systems contain more and more processor cores and exhibit increasingly diverse architectural tradeoffs, including memory hierarchies, interconnects, instruction sets and variants, and IO configurations. The dynamic nature of modern client and server workloads pose challenges for (future) operating system structures, which can be best met, say Roscoe and his co-authors, by embracing the networked nature of the machine, rethinking OS architecture using ideas from distributed systems.

In the prizewinning paper, the authors propose a different way of structuring an operating system to address these challenges. They investigate a new OS structure, the multikernel, that treats the machine as a network of independent cores, assumes no inter-core sharing at the lowest level, and moves traditional OS functionality to a distributed system of processes that communicate via message-passing.

Roscoe and his colleagues have implemented a multikernel OS to show that the approach is promising, and describe how traditional scalability problems for operating systems can be effectively recast using messages and can exploit insights from distributed systems and networking. Barrelfish, the implementation of the multikernel, is still in use as a foundation for research and the field and for teaching at ETH Zurich.