6.5810: Project

Introduction

The main focus of 6.5810 is in research in operating systems, which will be structured as a class final project. A good project will make a new contribution, rather than implementing an existing system or idea. It can be related to your graduate research, as long as it overlaps with the themes in the course. Collaboration is encouraged but not required: each project can be done in groups of two or individually. Projects will be evaluated based on a final presentation and a project write up.

Milestones

• Project Proposal (10/11): Send us a short email describing your project idea, how you plan to evaluate it, and your teammate (if applicable).
• Draft Project Report (11/4): Send us a draft of your project report, focusing on the motivation and design of your system, sans an evaluation.
• Final Project Report (12/14): Send us a complete version of your write up, including improvements upon the draft plus an evaluation of your system.

Project Ideas

You're welcome to choose your own project ideas. Here are some suggestions. We will continue to update this list as the course progresses.

Shenango:

• Shenango currently provides a highly optimized implementation of TCP/IP, but its transport-layer processing still incurs significant overheads, wasting several cores on I/O to sustain max throughput. Instead, use rDMA hardware (Like the Mellanox ConnectX-4) to offload transport layer processing into hardware (see libibverbs). Build and evaluate support for two-sided rDMA in the Shenango runtime. How much more efficient could Shenango be if we moved these functions into hardware?
• Power management features like CPU frequency scaling and parking idle cores can make CPUs more energy proportional. Unfortunately, these features have high transition delays, and typically harm tail latency. Design a scheduling policy in Shenango that hides these latencies from latency-sensitive applications, while still reducing power consumption when CPU load is low.
• Compatibility can be a major barrier to adoption for systems, even if they significantly improve performance. For example, Shenango’s pthread support is more than 10x faster than Linux, but lacks support for thread-local storage. Using the latest Intel instructions, investigate whether this feature could be supported without sacrificing efficiency.

Datacenter tax:

• One of the biggest challenges of accelerating the datacenter tax (memory copying, serialization, RPC, memory allocation, etc.) is its fine-grained and tightly coupled nature, making the high latency of PCIe bus a barrier to deploying accelerators for these functions. Instead, use a dedicated CPU core to simulate a new specialized hardware design that is integrated on-die with the processor (i.e., cache coherent and low latency). Evaluate how much your hypothetical accelerator could improve efficiency overall.

Library operating systems and containers:

• Using a tool like gVisor, could you transform entire legacy software systems into simple functions that you can call and stitch together?