Developing New Operating Systems

February 13, 2002 | Source: Computerworld

Ongoing research and development in operating systems is extending the ability for individuals and groups to use worldwide computing resources.

  • The Legion Project: Researchers at the University of Virginia are developing Legion, a highly flexible, wide-area operating system designed to build a virtual computer from millions of distributed hosts and trillions of objects while presenting to the user the image of a single computer.
  • The Globus Project: This is a university/government research and development project focused on applying grid concepts to scientific and engineering computing. The grid refers to an infrastructure that enables the integrated, collaborative use of high-end computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations.
  • The Endeavour project: Researchers involved in the Endeavour project at the University of California, Berkeley, envision an “information utility” that adapts on the fly to the supply and demand for computing resources anywhere in the world.
  • The WebOS project: The goal of this research effort at Duke University in Durham, N.C., is to provide a common set of operating system services to wide-area applications, including mechanisms for resource discovery, a global name space, remote process execution, resource management, authentication and security.
  • The Globe Project: Researchers involved in The Globe Project at Vrije University in Amsterdam are working on construction of large-scale wide-area distributed systems enabled by distributed shared objects.
  • MIT Project Oxygen: Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense, this project at MIT is intended to bring computation and communication to users through natural spoken and visual interfaces, in order to make it easy for users to collaborate, access knowledge and automate repetitive tasks.