The next operating system
Computer chips’ clocks have stopped getting faster. To maintain the regular doubling of computer power that we now take for granted, chip makers have been giving chips more “cores,” or processing units. But how to distribute computations across multiple cores is a hard problem, and this five-part series of articles examines the different levels at which MIT researchers are tackling it, from hardware design up to the development of new programming languages.At the most basic level, a computer is something that receives zeroes and ones from either memory or an input device — like a keyboard — combines them in some systematic way, and ships the results off to either memory or some output device — like a screen or speaker. An operating system, whether Windows, the Apple OS, Linux or any other, is software that mediates between applications, like word processors and Web browsers, and those rudimentary bit operations....