Speaker: Irene Zhang (Microsoft Research Redmond)

Time: 13:00—14:00 p.m., April 2, 2024, GMT+8

Venue: Lecture Hall 2736, Science Building #2. &  Zoom Link：ID 818 4601 2818, Password 289313

Abstract: 

Datacenter systems and I/O devices now run at single-digit microsecond latencies, requiring nanosecond-scale operating systems. Traditional kernel-based operating systems impose an unaffordable overhead, so recent kernel-bypass OSes (e.g., Arrakis, Ix) and libraries (e.g., Caladan, eRPC) eliminate the OS kernel from the I/O datapath. However, these systems do not offer a general-purpose datapath OS replacement that meet the needs of microsecond-scale systems.  As a result, while kernel-bypass hardware is widely available in the datacenter, it is not widely used.
This talk summarizes Demikernel, a flexible datapath OS and architecture designed for heterogenous kernel-bypass devices and microsecond-scale datacenter systems. Demikernel supports a variety of kernel-bypass hardware, including DPDK, RDMA, as well as software bypass solutions like io_uring. To support microsecond-scale operation, Demikernel includes a new nanosecond-scale TCP stack, written in Rust and proposes new memory management, CPU scheduling and network abstractions. Demikernel is currently used by Bing and will go into production with Azure services later this year.

Source: School of Computer Science, PKU