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Guy Harris (talk | contribs) m Guy Harris moved page Lightweight Kernel Operating System to Lightweight kernel operating system: Fix capitalization - this is a phrase that describes a type of operating system, not a name for a particular operating system. |
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== Characteristics ==
Although it is surprisingly difficult to exactly define what a lightweight kernel is,<ref>
{{cite
date=June 2015 |doi=10.1145/2768405.2768414 |chapter-url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2768414 |accessdate=19 October 2019|isbn=9781450336062 |s2cid=11698915 }}</ref> there are some common design goals:
* Targeted at massively parallel environments composed of thousands of processors with distributed memory and a tightly coupled network.
* Provide necessary support for scalable, performance-oriented scientific applications.
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By restricting services to only those that are absolutely necessary and by streamlining those that are provided, the overhead (sometimes called noise) of the lightweight operating system is minimized. This allows a significant ''and'' predictable amount of the processor cycles to be given to the parallel application. Since the application can make consistent progress on each processor, they will reach their synchronization points faster, ideally at the same time. Lost wait time is reduced.
== Future ==
The last supercomputers running lightweight kernels are the remaining IBM [[Blue Gene|Bluegene]] systems running [[CNK operating system|CNK]]. A new direction for lightweight kernels is to combine them with a
full-featured OS, such as Linux, on a many-core node. These multi-kernel operating systems run a lightweight kernel on some of the CPU cores of a node, while other cores provide services that are
omitted in lightweight kernels. By combining the two, users get the Linux features they need but also the deterministic behavior and scalability of lightweight kernels.
== References ==
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