FlexRTS: An extensible Orca run-time system

FlexRTS is a dynamically configurable and extensible run-time system for Orca, a high performance parallel programming system. It provides run-time and application programmers with full control over the implementation and placement of kernel and user-level modules (device drivers, protocol stacks, thread packages, etc.). This allows programmers to optimize the run-time system on a per application basis and take most leverage out of the available hardware. Keywords: operating systems, run-time systems, parallel programming, extensibility. 1. Introduction It is hard for an application programmer to take full advantage of existing hardware. This is largely caused by a lack of control over the available abstractions. Many researchers have interpreted this as kernel abstractions and have proposed mechanisms for extending or adapting these [4, 5, 8, 11, 14]. Non-kernel abstractions, e.g. those provided by a run-time system, are in theory easy to adapt and extend, but in practice they are j..