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Distributed

Distributed operating systems (OSs) are a type of network operating system (NOS). NOSs exist mostly or fully for, their main reason for being, is to facilitate networking, between two or more computers, to operate and improve networks, with non-trivial networking (e.g., routing) included and/or built in, which need not be added later, and they make little sense without their network functions. Many OSs have some networking ability, but not all such OSs are NOSs. Distributed OSs go beyond most NOSs, to divide, distribute, and even dynamically migrate tasks and information, to operate, over networks to run on two or more processors, often called clustering, and heterogeneous multiprocessing. By definition, distributed OSs are multiprocessor OSs, usually asymmetric.

On this page, OSs are arranged in two groups and levels: 1) Top group: OSs for which there are more than one instance of an OS of this name/type, an OS family. 2) Bottom group: specific OSs, individual instances; there is only one OS of this name/type.

Sites in Distributed

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.

Distributed Operating Systems
Short, annotated, alphabetically sorted list and links, part of larger system.

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.

DTOS
Distributed Trusted OS; Mach-based microkernel. Goal: show feasibility of including strong security mechanisms without sacrificing other desirable features; NSA funded as part of broad program encouraging strong, flexible security controls in next generation OSs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

Plan B Operating System
An operating system that lets applications be built simpler. The system selects and combines resources from the network semi-automatically.

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.

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]

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]

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]