The design of modern operating systems is based around the concept of memory as a cache for data that flows between applications, storage, and I/O devices. With the increasing disparity between I/O bandwidth and CPU performance, this architecture exposes the processor and memory subsystems as the bottlenecks to system performance. Furthermore, this design does not easily lend itself to exploitation of new capabilities in peripheral devices, such as programmable network cards or special-purpose hardware accelerators, capable of card-to-card data transfers.

FlowOS is a new operating system architecture that removes the memory and CPU from the data path. The role of the operating system is simply that of data-flow management, while applications operate purely at the signaling level. This design parallels the evolution of modern network routers, and has the potential to enable high-performance I/O for end-systems, as well as fully exploit recent trends in programmability of peripheral (I/O) devices.