Abstract

Over the last year, a group of us at MIT, Stanford, CMU, Google, and VMware have been designing and implementing a new Operating System (OS) stack for modern hyperscale datacenter environments. This new stack leverages a set of multi-core, multi-node distributed DBMSs near the bottom of the stack to manage a cluster of machines on a public or private cloud. In this paper, we briefly review the rationale for a new OS, present our resulting architecture, and review our progress to date. The meat of our paper is a presentation of the main lessons thus far from this project. Many of these have to do with missing capabilities in multi-node DBMSs that form the guts of our proposal. Finally, we present future research directions in database-oriented operating systems.