VELOSITY: A New Architecture for Operating System Design and Implementation

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Impact Our computing infrastructure is built on a fifty year old software architecture. The Velosity program is a bold approach to system design and implementation, leveraging the past fifty years of progress in operating system architecture, program synthesis, and security. As Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) enabled unprecedented hardware innovation and evolution, Velosity addresses today's need for flexible, reliable, and secure system software, unleashing the power of tomorrow's hardware platforms. For the past thirty years, our hardware infrastructure has been based upon the x86 monoculture. According to Turing laureate David Patterson, the end of Moore's Law produced "A new golden age for computer architecture." This new era brings new demands for system software: portability across hardware implementations and the ability to support emerging platforms. Objectives, Methodology and HQP The long-term objective of Velosity is to develop libraries of OS components, derived from machine independent specifications, that include functional, security, and introspective capabilities. From these formally specified, secure components we can construct customized operating systems or system software. Thus, a vendor with new hardware can assemble system software with precisely the needed functionality. Velosity addresses today's hardware heterogeneity through a combination of domain specific languages (DSL) and program synthesis. Operating system designers specify the required functionality and security properties of small components in a DSL designed specifically for that purpose; hardware vendors describe the semantics of their hardware or hardware interfaces using a different DSL. By combining these two DSLs with state-of-the-art program synthesis and compilation techniques, we produce system software for a wide range of hardware platforms without the tedious process of porting (translating) low-level systems between platforms. Velosity requires research in operating system architecture, DSL development, and program synthesis. Here, we address four challenges: 1) Design and development of a component library from which we can construct system software. 2) Design and implementation of DSLs for specifying system functionality, and 3) hardware capabilities. 4) Adaptation of existing program synthesis techniques and development of new techniques for system software. Over the five-year Discovery Grant term, I will train two PhD students, five MSc students, and one postdoctoral fellow. To summarize, VLSI technology brought two fundamental benefits to hardware design, enabling both development of libraries of reusable component and architectural experimentation. Velosity provides the same essential benefits to system software. Its component libraries are reusable components, which will allow for architectural experimentation on heterogeneous hardware. Thus, Velosity provides hardware platforms with the right system software stack.