IHK/McKernel is a light-weight multi-kernel operating system designed for high-end supercomputing. It runs Linux and McKernel, a light-weight kernel (LWK), side-by-side inside compute nodes and aims at the following:

• Provide scalable and consistent execution of large-scale parallel scientific applications, but at the same time maintain the ability to rapidly adapt to new hardware features and emerging programming models
• Provide efficient memory and device management so that resource contention and data movement are minimized at the system level
• Eliminate OS noise by isolating OS services in Linux and provide jitter free execution on the LWK
• Support the full POSIX/Linux APIs by selectively offloading (slow-path) system calls to Linux