A Down-to-Earth Educational Operating System for Up-in-the-Cloud Many-Core Architectures

Authors

Michael W. Ziwisky, Marquette University
Kyle Persohn, Marquette UniversityFollow
Dennis Brylow, Marquette UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Language

eng

Publication Date

1-2013

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Source Publication

ACM Transactions on Computing Education

Source ISSN

1946-6226

Abstract

We present Xipx, the first port of a major educational operating system to a processor in the emerging class of many-core architectures. Through extensions to the proven Embedded Xinu operating system, Xipx gives students hands-on experience with system programming in a distributed message-passing environment. We expose the software primitives needed to maintain coherency between many cores in a system lacking specialized caching hardware. Our proposed series of laboratory assignments adds parallel thread execution and inter-core message passing communication to a well-established OS curriculum.

Comments

Accepted version. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, Vol. 13, No. 1 (January 2013). DOI. © 2013 Association for Computing Machinery. Used with permission.

Recommended Citation

Ziwisky, Michael W.; Persohn, Kyle; and Brylow, Dennis, "A Down-to-Earth Educational Operating System for Up-in-the-Cloud Many-Core Architectures" (2013). Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications. 9.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/comp_fac/9