Sandia’s Kitten Lightweight Kernel operating system has been ported to a pre-production Intel Knights Landing system and demonstrated running the XPRESS system software stack on the “many-core” system’s 240 available hardware contexts (Figure 1). The demo was presented at a recent DOE ASCR X-Stack Program Principal Investigator Meeting and consisted of the Kitten Lightweight Kernel booting, detecting and initializing all of the system’s cores and memory, and then starting the HPX-5 version of the LULESH benchmark. As a demonstration of the RCR power monitoring agent and APEX policy engine developed by the XPRESS project, the demo showed a user-defined power constraint being enforced by dynamically changing the number of active hardware contexts based on observed power usage, highlighting the dynamic adaptive capability of the XPRESS system software stack.
