Rolf Riesen
Ph.D. proposal submitted to the Computer Science
Department of the University of New Mexico
December 10, 1996
CPUs, network interfaces, and networks are improving, providing higher bandwidths and lower latencies. System software overhead makes it impossible for a user application to achieve bandwidths and latencies near the hardware limits. This is especially true for remote handler invocation. Typically, the remote node has to trap into the kernel and perform an expensive context switch to the handler. This hampers global communication operations and runtime systems, such as the one for Cilk and Split-C for example.
Executing the untrusted remote handler inside the operating system kernel eliminates the overhead of context switches and disrupted cashes. Several methods to execute untrusted user code in a privileged environment exist. The research proposed in this paper compares these methods and attempts to prove that a kernel embedded interpreter has the necessary performance and safety characteristics to be the ideal method for remote handler invocation in massively parallel systems.
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