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Futuristic UC Berkeley OS Tessellation Controls Discrete 'Manycore' Resources
coondoggie writes "At the Design Automation Conference (DAC) here this week, John Kubiatowicz, professor in the UC Berkeley computer science division, offered a preview of Tessellation, describing it as an operating system for the future where surfaces with sensors, such as walls and tables in rooms, for example, could be utilized via touch or audio command to summon up multimedia and other applications. The UC Berkeley Tessellation website says Tessellation is targeted at existing and future so-called 'manycore' based systems that have large numbers of processors, or cores on a single chip. Currently, the operating system runs on Intel multicore hardware as well as the Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors (RAMP) multicore emulation platform."
I know I'm going to hell for this, but I read "futuristic" and "tessellation" in the summary and immediately thought of Loki from The Avengers. Terrible villain really, just went bad because he had daddy issues. *cough* Crap... going off topic and triggering a flame war from marvel lovers. Yeah. I'm taking the special bus to hell now...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Some of what they're doing with resource guarantees is like QNX's "sporadic scheduling". The idea is that you can guarantee a thread something like 1ms of CPU time every 10ms. This is useful for near-real-time tasks which need a bounded guarantee of responsiveness but don't need to preempt everything else immediately. Most UI activity is in this category. With lots of UI devices, including ones like vision systems that need serious compute resources, you need either something like this, or dedicated hardware for each device.
On top of sporadic scheduling there should be a resource allocator which doesn't let you overcommit resources. So if something is allowed to run, it will run at the required speed.
This is very useful in industrial process control and robotics. The use case for human interfaces is less convincing.
Tessellation means to cover a polygon with smaller polygons. That's it.
Now whenever you google it, it turns up all this garbage from clueless gamers who think it's some kind of Crysis 3 feature. Now on top of that we have to deal with this?
"Is security an issue? Yes, Kubiatowicz acknowledges, suggesting cryptography, for one thing needs to be part of it."
When are people going to learn? Unless you design an operating system to be secure from the very start, it is never going to be really secure.
Some valuable lessons may be learned from this, but I don't see it having much of a future.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Well, it's definitely for nerds, but the Tesselation paper was published in 2009, so hardly news. For those that don't have ACM DL access, the paper is interesting, but suffers from many of the same problems as LibOS / Exokernel approaches.
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isn't that like using a computer through a secretary?
it's inefficient for most tasks.
anyhow, buy xbox one when it comes out. at least then you can get the nbc news by asking it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So there is a new weird name for an OS, but how is it really different from any other OS in that every other modern OS can do the same and will be doing the same: allow many input devices and it is up to drivers to take care of what type of device is allowed.
Wow, Roman, just wow. We knew you failed math, physics, chemistry, biology, and (your favorite lecture subject) economics while taking courses at one of the largest publicly funded research universities in the western hemisphere. But apparently you failed operating systems as well? What you just stated describes quite nearly every operating system ever made and would suggest that every OS is the same regardless of its lineage. I have never met a reasonable person who would suggest, for example, that DOS, Mac OS, Mac OS X, BSD, QNIX, Solaris, and BeOS are all exactly the same, yet you just did exactly that.
Of course, you are not a reasonable person. Is a bizarre statement such as what you just made just another step in your goal of establishing a fascist government in the united states (and of course eventually the world)?
Call me old-fashioned, but I like having an interface between me and the machine. Even if it becomes some haptic setup, I find it somewhat comforting to have a little something between me and it.
I hope my need to have congress with a machine never becomes so great that I have to do away with the interface.
Of course, we could skip the whole neural interface and go straight to the autonomous machines...
You are welcome on my lawn.