The Case for the Holistic Language Runtime System

Authors: Martin Maas, Krste Asanovic, Tim Harris, John Kubiatowicz
Date: April 2014
Conference: International Workshop on Rack-scale Computing (WRSC '14), Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abstract: We anticipate that, by 2020, the basic unit of warehouse-scale cloud computing will be a rack-sized machine instead of an individual server. At the same time, we expect a shift from commodity hardware to custom SoCs that are specifically designed for the use in warehouse-scale computing. In this paper, we make the case that the software for such custom rack-scale machines should move away from the model of running managed language workloads in separate language runtimes on top of a traditional operating system but instead run a distributed language runtime system capable of handling different target languages and frameworks. All applications will execute within this runtime, which performs most traditional OS and cluster manager functionality such as resource management, scheduling and isolation.