A polystore based database operating system (DBOS)
Michael Cafarella
David DeWitt
Vijay Gadepally
Jeremy Kepner
Tim Kraska
MIT
Michael Stonebraker
MIT
Matei Zaharia
UC Berkeley
International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) Workshop, 2020
Abstract
Current operating systems are complex systems that were designed before today’s computing environments. This makes it difficult for them to meet the scalability, heterogeneity, availability, and security challenges in current cloud and parallel computing environments. To address these problems, we propose a radically new OS design based ondata-centric architecture: all operating system state should be represented uniformly as database tables, and operations on this state should be made via queries from otherwise stateless tasks. This design makes it easy to scale and evolve the OS without whole-system refactoring, inspect and debug system state, upgrade components without downtime, manage decisions using machine learning, and implement sophisticated security features. We discuss how a database OS (DBOS) can improve the programmability and performance of many of today’s most important …