Barrelfish is a new research operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK. We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems. We are motivated by two closely related trends in Hardware design: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.

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