CONTEXT

TSAR (Tera-Scale Architecture) is a cc-NUMA (Cache Coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access) many-cores architecture scalable to +1000 cores developed by LIP6 in cooperation with BULL.

ALMOS (Advanced Locality Management Operating System) is new research operating system currently under development by LIP6 and targeting cc-NUMA many-cores architectures. It brings new solutions, at kernel level, to problems caused by NUMA characteristics and scalability in number of cores. The kernel of ALMOS manages hardware resources, memory and processors, in a dynamic and transparent manner to user applications. It allows execution of existing multi-threaded application and without prior modification.  

ALMOS provides a POSIX mulit-processes, multi-threads environment. It currently has a fairly complete standard C library, standard PThread library, standard math library and the run-time GNU OpenMP. Several applications have been ported or developed over ALMOS. Preliminary evaluation results of both highly multi-threaded applications, SPLASH-2/FFT (HPC class) and EPfilter (medical image processing provided by the firm Philips), were promising and exhibit a near-linear speedup up to 256 cores. 

The goal of this research internship is to continue the experimental evaluation of the scalability of ALMOS by porting and running new applications using TSAR simulator configured up to 1024 cores.

WORK PROPOSAL

The student must make a bibliography focused on the scalability of shared-memory multi-threaded applications and most known benchmarks. He is responsible to select a subset of applications, review their parallelism profiles, port them on ALMOS and experimentally evaluate their performance. The experimental phase should allows to characterize the scalability of these applications on ALMOS using TSAR simulator configured up to 1024 cores.

SUPERVISION 

This research internship will be supervised by :

  - Ghassan Almaless : ghassan.almaless(at)lip6(.)fr

  - Franck Wajsburt   : franck.wajsburt(at)lip6(.)fr

DURATION

This research internship is for 6 month, full-time, and will be conducted at LIP6 laboratory.