Network Servers for Multikernel OS on Manycore Systems

Manycore system hardware has evolved over time and more than 200 core systems are now available. In a manycore environment, multikernel model is best suited for ensuring performance scalability. Multikernel comprises of Light Weight Kernels (LWK) and full weight kernel (FWK). LWK provides scalability and parallelism by minimizing kernel functionality, and compute intensive functionality (such as I/O stack) can be offloaded to the FWK. However, in the case of manycore systems, as the number of LWKs increase with an increase in the application requests, performance bottlenecks can arise as FWK must handle all the requests. In this paper, we focus on the network functions and define the structure of network servers to guarantee performance when multikernel operating system is implemented in manycore environment. Network services should be created organically upon application request to support performance and should also take the core affinity into consideration so that performance in the NUMA architecture is not degraded. Such network servers will be able to provide more functions to a multikernel based operating system through the development of various servers in the future.