While Exascale computing may be years away, Pete Beckman from Argonne and a team of researchers are already looking at what the operating system might look like. At the recent Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers event in Oregon, Beckman described the Argo OS project and how it might handle an Exascale architecture with large amounts of non-volatile memory.
Argo is a new exascale operating system and runtime system designed to support extreme-scale scientific computation. It is built on an agile, new modular architecture that supports both global optimization and local control. It aims to efficiently leverage new chip and interconnect technologies while addressing the new modalities, programming environments, and workflows expected at exascale. It is designed from the ground up to run future high-performance computing applications at extreme scales. We anticipate that this work will form the basis of production exascale systems deployed in the 2018–2020 timeframe.