The Case for the Holistic Language Runtime System

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 specically designed for the use in warehouse-scale comput- ing. 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 capa- ble of handling dierent target languages and frameworks. All applications will execute within this runtime, which per-forms most traditional OS and cluster manager functionality such as resource management, scheduling and isolation.