DR AF T Data centers are microkernels done accidentally : lessons for building a million-core distributed OS

Data centers have accidentally fulfilled the microkernel vision: they move critical operating system components into user-space middleware. Consequentially, it is time to move to a different view of the OS in the data center— treating the node OS merely as a local enforcement agent of global decisions made by user-space systems software. Based on this observation, we present a novel distributed OS design for treating the data center as a “warehouse-scale computer”, and explain why this has attractive benefits for common distributed applications.