Antonio Barbalace

Today’s data center hardware is increasingly heterogeneous, including several special-purpose and reconfigurable accelerators that sit along with the central processing unit (CPU). Emerging platforms include also heterogeneous memory – directly attached, NUMA, and over peripheral bus. Furthermore, processing units (CPUs and/or accelerators), pop-up in storage devices, network cards, and along the memory hierarchies (near data processing architectures). Therefore, introducing hardware topologies that didn’t exist before!

Existent, traditional, systems software has been designed and developed with the assumption that a single computer hosts a single CPU complex with direct attached memory, or NUMA. Therefore, there is one operating system running per computer, and software is compiled to run on a specific CPU complex. However, within emerging platforms this doesn’t apply anymore because every different processing unit requires its own operating system and applications, which are not compatible between each other, making a single platform look like a distributed system – even when CPU complexes are tightly coupled. This makes programming hard and hinders all of a set of performance optimizations. Therefore, this talk argues that new systems software is needed to better support emerging non-traditional hardware topologies, and introduces new operating system and compiler design(s) to achieve easier programming, and full system performance exploitation.

Antonio Barbalace’s research interests include all aspects of system software, embracing hypervisors, operating systems, runtime libraries, and compilers/linkers, for emerging highly-parallel and heterogeneous computer architectures, including near data processing platforms and new generation interconnects with coherent shared memory. His research seeks answers about how to architect or re-architect the entire software stack to ease programmability, portability, enable improved performance and energy efficiency, determinism, fault tolerance, and security. His research work appeared at top systems venues including EuroSys, ASPLOS, VEE, ICDCS, Middleware, EMSOFT, HotOS, HotPower, and OLS.