by Thom Holwerda
“It seems like Microsoft Research is really busy these days with research operating systems. We had Singularity, a microkernel operating system written in managed code, and late last week we were acquainted with Barrelfish, a “multikernel” system which treats a multicore system as a network of independent cores, using ideas from distributed systems. Now, we have a third contestant, and it’s called Helios.
Helios is also a project coming out of Microsoft Research, and it’s described as complementary to Barrelfish - in the research sense of the word. Helios is based on Singularity, but introduces support for satellite kernels, remote message passing, and affinity. The research paper written by the team behind Helios describes the operating system as:”
“Helios is an operating system designed to simplify the task of writing, deploying, and tuning applications for heterogeneous platforms. Helios introduces satellite kernels, which export a single, uniform set of OS abstractions across CPUs of disparate architectures and performance characteristics.”
