Toward Full Specialization of the HPC Software Stack
Balazs Gerofi, Rolf Riesen, Robert W. Wisniewski, Yutaka Ishikawa · 2017
Application containers enable users to have greater control of their user-space execution environment by bundling application code with all the necessary libraries in a single software package. Lightweight multi-kernels leverage multi-core CPUs to run separate operating system (OS) kernels on different CPU cores, usually a lightweight kernel (LWK) and Linux. A multi-kernel's primary goal is attaining LWK scalability and performance in combination with support for the Linux APIs and environment. Both of these technologies are designed to address the increasing hardware complexity and the growing software diversity of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. While containers enable specialization of user-space components, the LWK part of a multi-kernel system is also a form of software specialization, but targeting kernel space.