| AgentOS: Mobile agent system for ubiquitous computing; new way to cope with the wide-area, large-scale ubiquitous computing environment of near future. Allows access to personal and collaborative computing services anywhere, via varied desktop and mobile computing devices. |
| AgentOS: Agent-based Distributed Operating System for Mobile Networks: Agent-based communication models show great promise to operate in unpredictable, metamorphic environments, such as mobile computing networks. Excellent basic explanations, clear arguments, well reasoned; from Crossroads, ACM student magazine. |
| AtomsNet: Modular object-oriented application to index files across networks. Consists of plug-in type data retrieval system, webserver, peer-to-peer connections for network-wide information gathering, retrieval; has features of OSs, database management systems, distributed networking. [Open Source, GPL] |
| E1: A distributed operating system based on the concepts of object replication, component model support and persistence. It consists of a L4 microkernel and a set of distributed objects acting at the user level. [Open source] |
| GLUnix: Global Layer Unix; technology trends in high-speed, low-latency LANs suggest convergence of hardware in Massively Parallel Processors, MPPs, and Networks of Workstations, NOWs. Relative to many MPPs, NOWs offer more cost-effectiveness and scalability, and less hardware and software development time. Soon, the main difference between NOWs and MPPs will be OS software. |
| GUIDE: Grenoble Universities Integrated Distributed Environment. Object-oriented distributed OS to develop and operate distributed applications on local area networks of workstations and servers. Joint project Bull, IMAG Research Institute; related to COMANDOS, BROADCAST Esprit Projects. |
| Hive: Distributed Unix operating system for Stanford FLASH multiprocessor; survives hardware and software faults, performance near commercial Unix. Arranged as internal system of independent kernels (cells) for reliability, scalability. |
| Hurricane: hierarchically clustered OS implemented on Hector multiprocessor; manages system resources in clusters, using tight coupling within clusters, loose coupling across clusters. Succeeded by Tornado. |
| Institute for Distributed Systems: IVS: Researches distributed and realtime operating systems, communication, software engineering. Part of Department of Computer Science at the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg. Some information on site not in English. |
| MIT LCS PDOS: Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group; research focus: extensible and flexible system services: filesystems, networking, languages. Projects: 'C, Chord, Click, Exokernel (Exopc), Grid, Prolac, RON, and SFS. Funding: DARPA, NSF; AT&T, IBM, Intel. Many open source downloads. |
| MOSIX: Software package to enhance Unix kernels (7 so far) and Linux with cluster computing abilities. Lets any size cluster of x86-based workstations and servers work cooperatively as if part of one system. [Open Source, GPL] |
| MOSIX Clusters of Surplus Computers for Providing Common Network Services and Applications: Details active project to illustrate use of MOSIX to create clusters of surplus machines that can be used to provide network services, application resources. |
| Plan B Operating System: An operating system that lets applications be built simpler. The system selects and combines resources from the network semi-automatically. |
| Quarks: Simple, yet efficient distributed shared memory (DSM) system; a user-level library plus header files supports DSM on groups of Unix workstations. Runs on 4.3BSD/M68k, HP-UX/PA-RISC, IRIX 5.2/MIPS, SunOS 4.1/SPARC. [Open Source, public domain] |
| Sprite: Distributed OS gives one system image to/over a networked cluster of workstations, research project, Berkeley, John Outerhoust group; high file system performance via client and server caching, process migration to use idle machines; testbed for research in file systems (log-structured, striped, RAID), crash recovery. |
| SUMO: Support for Multimedia in Operating systems, Lancaster University: microkernel OS with facilities to support distributed realtime and multimedia applications and ODP-based multimedia distributed application platforms. |
| The Brave New OS of the Future: Brief, simple layman's treatment of Carnegie Mellon University's Odyssey project; IBM Research's Autonomic Computing initiative; Microsoft's Farsite project. [CNN.com] |
| Tornado: Object-oriented operating system for large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors. Minimizes data sharing via careful design: often eliminates data sharing even when sharing appears natural. Successor to Hurricane. |
| WebOS: Gives distributed OS services needed to build applications that are wide-area, highly available, incrementally scalable, dynamically reconfiguring, with mechanisms for: resource discovery, global namespace, remote process execution, resource management, authentication, security. |
| XOS: Distributed operating system, to be fully object-oriented, preemptively multithreaded/tasked, event/message-driven. Little code yet, but design documents and links are interesting, useful reading. |
Classical
