Porting effort towards TILERA massive multicore CPUs...?

[Robert Watson]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2010, Ivan Voras wrote:

>>> there is a rather new processor from TILERA (100 core chip) which is most 
>>> certainly already known here at FreeBSD mailing list.
>>
>> Theory has it I'll be getting access to Intel SCC 48/96-core hardware here 
>> at Cambridge in the moderately near future, and I've been pondering what 
>> would be involved.  Their model involves 48+ x86 cores without cache 
>> coherency, so you need separate OS instances for each.  However, the cores 
>> are linked by fifo-like memory that we'll need to figure out what to do 
>> with.
>
> Sounds pretty much made for a variation on the microkernel design, or 
> virtualization.

With repsect to the former: more the distributed microkernel model, or the 
recently more trendy "multikernel" which appears to be functionally quite 
similar :-).  For the latter: yes, hence the name Single-Chip Cloud Computer. 
If the TILERA is offering stronger cache coherence properties with similar 
scalability, that makes it a more appealing target, however.

Robert