The trend toward manycore systems presents serious challenges for client devices. Users will expect better performance from applications as the number of cores increases; this expectation requires parallel client applications and exploiting parallelism that is likely to be fragile and easily disturbed by interference. At the same time, users have increased their appetite for responsive user interfaces and high-quality multimedia (e.g., videoconferencing, multi-player gaming, and music composition) with stringent real-time requirements; such needs are not well supported by today’s commodity operating systems.
Our charter is to investigate new structures for operating systems and multicore hardware that can simultaneously support real-time, responsive, and high-throughput parallel applications.