Redshift is a new operating system aimed to support heterogeneous hardware, e.g., FPGAs, GPUs, TPUs, near storage, and near network cores, etc., as first class citizens.

In contrast to today's systems centered around general-purpose processors also known as central processing units (CPUs), the next generation of high-performance computers will inherently rely on diverse, heterogeneous hardware ranging from many-core processors like Intel Xeon Phi that contains up to 72 processor cores and graphical processing units (GPUs) to specialized hardware accelerators, like specialized machine-learning chips and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) re-programmed on demand for a specific task. In a hardware-accelerated environment that consists of many diverse execution units, the execution of a program is no longer a conventional thread tied to a single CPU, but a graph of small computations scheduled on a set of hardware accelerators each implementing a part of the program logic. Redshift is a new operating system for developing applications that leverage performance of a heterogeneous hardware-accelerated system.

At the core of Redshift is a dataflow programming model that enables execution of commodity programs on a network of heterogeneous hardware execution units with only minimal modifications. Redshift implements programs as collections of asynchronous invocations that transparently move execution between hardware functions. A novel runtime maps computations to execution units, balances load among them, and scales the hardware graph of computation in response to load.