Characteristic Analysis of Operating Systems for Large Scale Hierarchical NUMA System

LH-NUMAs are essentially clusters of NUMA nodes with a globally shared memory abstraction, either in hardware or in software. This Abstract architecture just like expensive mainframe, while keep the price low as commercial clusters of servers. It is a prospective optional major architecture for cloud computing in today´s era of big data. This article studies the special needs for OS requested by LH-NUMA. And we push the OS design principles of Hive, Fos, Multikernel, etc., a little further by embracing the characteristics of LH-NUMA. The contribution includes: 1) Analyzing the architectural of LH-NUMA, a distinctive architecture located between cluster and mainframe. 2) Analyzing the challenges to the OS for LH-NUMA according to the characteristics of LH-NUMA. 3) Analyzing the inefficiency of running current OSes for many-core system on LH-NUMA. 4) Try to apply the Hive, Fos, Multikernel and other design principles of many-core OS to LH-NUMA and analyzing the advantages and insufficiency for LH-NUMA. 5) Listing the requirements and picturing the framework principle for OS on LH-NUMA.