Open-source computer systems initiative: The motivation, essence, challenges, and methodology

The global community faces many pressing and uncertain challenges like pandemics and global climate change. Information technology (IT) infrastructure has become the enabler to addressing those challenges. Unfortunately, IT decoupling has distracted and weakened the international community’s ability to handle those challenges.

This article initiates an open-source computer system (OSCS) initiative to tackle the challenges of IT decoupling. The OSCS movement is where open-source software converges with open-source hardware. Its essential is to utilize the inherent characteristics of a class of representative workloads and propose innovative abstraction and methodology to co-explore the software and hardware design spaces of high-end computer systems, attaining peak performance, security, and other fundamental dimensions. I discuss its four challenges, including the system complexity, the tradeoff between universal and ideal systems, guaranteeing quality of computation results and performance under different conditions, e.g., best-case, worst-case, or average-case, and balancing legal, patent, and license issues.

Inspired by the philosophy of building large systems out of smaller functions, I propose the funclet abstraction and methodology to tackle the first challenge. The funclet abstraction is a well-defined, evolvable, reusable, independently deployable, and testable functionality with modest complexity. Each funclet interoperates with other funclets through standard bus interfaces or interconnections. Four funclet building blocks: chiplet, HWlet, envlet, and servlet at the chip, hardware, environment management, and service layers form the four-layer funclet architecture. The advantages of the funclet abstraction and architecture are discussed. The project’s website is publicly available from https://www.opensourcecomputer.org or https://www.computercouncil.org.