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Summary: The Case for VOS: The Vector Operating System
Vijay Vasudevan, David G. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky1
Carnegie Mellon University, 1Intel Labs
Abstract
Operating systems research for many-core systems has
recently focused its efforts on supporting the scalability of
OS-intensive applications running on increasingly paral-
lel hardware. Lost amidst the march towards this parallel
future is efficiency: Perfectly parallel software may sat-
urate the parallel capabilities of the host system, but in
doing so can waste hardware resources.
This paper describes our motivation for the Vector OS,
a design inspired by vector processing systems that pro-
vides efficient parallelism. The Vector OS organizes and
executes requests for operating system resources through
"vector" interfaces that operate on vectors of objects. We
argue that these interfaces allow the OS to capitalize on nu-
merous chances to both eliminate redundant work found
in OS-intensive systems and use the underlying paral-
lel hardware to its full capability, opportunities that are
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