High-performance computing has been on an inexorable march from gigascale to tera- and petascale, with many researchers now actively contemplating exascale (1018, or a million trillion operations per second) systems. This progression is being accelerated by the rapid increase in multi- and many-core processors, which allow even greater opportunities for parallelism. Such densities, though, give rise to a new cohort of challenges; for example, containing system software overhead, dealing with large numbers of schedulable entities, and maintaining energy efficiency.

We are studying software and processor-architectural features that will allow us to achieve these goals. We believe that exascale operation will require significant “out of the box” thinking, specifically in terms of the role of operating systems and system software. We describe some of our research into how these goals can be achieved.