Yes you certainly can: At my university they are building a new operating system from scratch with multicore/multi CPU systems in mind, their vision is that som

Yes you certainly can: At my university they are building a new operating system from scratch with multicore/multi CPU systems in mind, their vision is that someday we might have 5-10 specialized "CPU"s in our machines for better parallelization. Current OS have a hard time dealing with such heterogenous systems so they decided to start from scratch: The entire OS is structured as a distributed system with a dedicated mini-kernel running on each core of the processor and potentially also your network card etc. They even disallow shared memory between the core kernels and solely communicate through a message passing system. If you are interested in their approach check out the Barrelfish website: http://www.barrelfish.org http://www.barrelfish.org And here is a great overview of the architecture: http://www.barrelfish.org/TN-000-Overview.pdf http://www.barrelfish.org/TN-000-Overview.pdf