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ROSS – Opening Panel: Is Accelerator Firmware the New HPC OS? Opportunities and Challenges for the OS/R Research Community
DescriptionThe proposition for the panel is that specialized (lightweight) OS kernel architectures have become the dominant OS architecture for large-scale HPC systems, with the caveat that these specialized OSes are located in the opaque firmware blobs running on hardware accelerators (primarily GPUs). It is likely that this trend will continue with the majority (if not all) of the performance on the systems being managed by black-box firmware that is only accessible via a work-queue interface implemented by an often proprietary driver stack. Projecting into the future, performance will likely no longer be the primary concern for the open/modifiable components of supercomputing OS architectures, and so the community's research focus will instead need to shift to new capabilities and features that we can bring to the HPC environments. These features could include, for example, multi-tenancy capabilities, security partitioning and confidential computing, support for on-demand workloads with real-time constraints, and integration with edge resources and scientific instruments. An alternative viewpoint is that the research community should instead shift to custom/open hardware solutions that are either designed specifically for research or developed as part of a co-design effort with hardware architects. The purpose of this panel is to foster a conversation amongst the community about how we as a community should address the current landscape of HPC architectures; specifically, whether we should shift the focus of OS/R research away from performance-oriented approaches, and what new potential research opportunities are emerging in an accelerator-dominated ecosystem.
Event Type
Workshop
TimeSunday, 12 November 20239:05am - 10am MST
Location704-706
Middleware and System Software
Programming Frameworks and System Software
Runtime Systems
W