Hobbes Project Overview
Hobbes is a Sandia-led collaboration between four national laboratories
and eight universities supported by the DOE Office of Science
Advanced Scientific Computing Research
program office. The goal of this three-year project is to deliver an
operating system for future extreme-scale parallel computing platforms
that will address the major technical challenges of energy efficiency,
managing massive parallelism and deep memory hierarchies, and providing
resilience in the presence of increasing failures. Our approach is to
enable application composition through lightweight virtualization.
Application composition is a critical capability that will be the
foundation of the way extreme-scale systems must be used in the
future. The tighter integration of modeling and simulation capability
with analysis and the increasing complexity of application workflows
demand more sophisticated machine usage models and new system-level
services. Ensemble calculations for uncertainty quantification, large
graph analytics, multi-materials and multi-physics applications are
just a few examples that are driving the need for these new system
software interfaces and mechanisms for managing memory, network, and
computational resources. Rather than providing a single unified operating
system and runtime system that supports several parallel programming
models, Hobbes is leveraging lightweight virtualization to provide the
flexibility to construct and efficiently execute custom OS/R environments.
Hobbes extends our existing work on the
Kitten
lightweight operating system and the
Palacios
lightweight virtual machine monitor.
The goals of the Hobbes project are to:
- Deliver a prototype OS/R environment for R&D in extreme-scale scientific computing
- Focus on application composition as a fundamental driver
- Develop the necessary OS/R interfaces and system services required to support isolation and sharing
- Support complex simulation and analysis workflows
- Provide a lightweight OS/R environment with the flexibility to build custom runtime systems
- Compose applications from a collection of enclaves
- Leverage the Kitten lightweight kernel and Palacios lightweight virtual machine monitor
- Enable high-risk, high-impact research in virtualization, energy/power, scheduling, and resilience
Hobbes team members
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