Perlis Distinguished Lecture
Thursday, November 19, 2009
4:00 p.m., Dunham Lab, Room 220
10 Hillhouse Avenue

Refreshments will be available at 3:45.

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Host: Bryan Ford

Speaker: Frans Kaashoek, MIT
Title: The multicore evolution and operating systems

Abstract: Multicore chips with hundreds of cores will likely be available soon. Current trends suggest that cores will be relatively simple, that on-chip memory will be partitioned into per-core caches, and that each cache will be relatively small. Furthermore, chips will continue to be pin-limited and therefor DRAM interfaces won't scale with the number of cores. These trends pose challenges for operating system design, because operating systems services scale poorly with number of cores and often are limited by memory. This talk presents some first steps to tackling these challenges.

Joint work with: S. Boyd-Wickizer, A. Clements, Y. Mao, A. Pesterev, F. Kaashoek, R. Morris, N. Zeldovich (MIT) and in collaboration with H. Chen, R. Chen, L. Stein, M. Wu, Y. Dai, Z. Zhang (MSRA)

Bio: M. Frans Kaashoek is a full professor in MIT's EECS department and a member of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he coleads the parallel and distributed operating systems group (http://www.pdos.csail.mit.edu/). He received a PhD (1992) from the Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) for his work on group communication in the Amoeba distributed operating system, under the supervision of A.S. Tanenbaum. Frans's principal field of interest is designing and building computer systems. In collaboration with students and colleagues, his past contributions include the exokernel operating system, the Click modular router, the RON overlay, the self-certifying file system, the Chord distributed hash table, and the Asbestos/Flume secure operating system. Frans is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the recipient of several awards, including the inaugural ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser award for demonstrating creativity and innovation in operating systems research.