Distributed Operating Systems

• Alpha Kernel (Carnegie Mellon University) Group Members
• Amoeba (Vrije Universiteit)
  Amoeba is a powerful micro-kernel-based system that turns a collection of workstations or single-board computers into a transparent distributed system. It has been in use in academia, industry, and government for about 5 years.
• Angel (City University of London)
  Angel is designed as a generic parallel and distributed operating system, although it is currently targeted towards a high-speed network of PCs. This model of computing has the dual advantage of both a cheap initial cost and also a low incremental cost. By treating a network of nodes as a single shared memory machine, using distributed virtual shared memory (DVSM) techniques, we have addressed both the needs for improved performance and provided a more portable and useful platform for our applications.
• Chorus (Sun Microsystems)
  CHORUS is a family of open micro-kernel-based operating system components to meet advanced distributed computing needs in areas such as telecommunications, internetworking, embedded systems, realtime, "mainframe UNIX", supercomputing and high availability. The CHORUS/MiX multiserver implementations of UNIX allow to dynamically integrate part or all of standard UNIX functionalities and services in the\ above application areas.
• GLUnix (University of California, Berkeley)
  Group Members: Thomaas Anderson, Doug Ghormley, David Petrou, et al.
  Currently, modern workstation operating systems do not provide support for efficient distributed program execution in an environment shared with sequential applications. The goal of our research is to pool resources in a NOW to provide better performance for both parallel and sequential applications. To realize this goal, the operating system must support gang-scheduling of parallel programs, identify idle resources in the network, allow for process migration to support dynamic load balancing, and provide support for fast inter-process communication.
• GUIDE
  Guide (Grenoble Universities Integrated Distributed Environment) is an object-oriented distributed operating system for the development and operation of distributed applications on a local area networks connecting workstations and servers. Guide is a joint project of Bull and the IMAG Research Institute (Universities of Grenoble), which have created the Bull-IMAG joint Research Laboratory. It also has strong links with the COMANDOS Esprit Project (Construction and Management of Distributed Open Systems) and the BROADCAST Esprit Basic Research project.
• Hurricane
  The Hurricane operating system is a hierarchically clustered operating system implemented on the Hector multiprocessor. Hierarchical clustering manages the system resources in clusters, using tight coupling within a cluster, and loose coupling across clusters. Distributed systems principles are applied by distributing and replicating system services and data objects to increase locality, increase concurrency, and to avoid centralized bottlenecks, thus making the system scalable.
• Mach (Carnegie Mellon University)
  Mach is one of the giants in the operating systems research community. Originally started at CMU, Mach has become the basis for many research systems. Although work on Mach at CMU has largely stopped except real-time work and multi-server work, many other groups are still using Mach as the basis for research.
• Mach at OSF (OSF Research Institute)
  Related to: Mach
  The OSF Research Institute is using the Mach technology started at CMU and is using it as the basis for several areas of research, including operating systems for parallel machines, trusted object-oriented kernels, and other OS research areas.
• Maruti (University of Maryland) Group Members
  Maruti is a time-based operating system research project at the University of Maryland. With Maruti 3.0, we are entering a new phase of our project. We have an operating system suitable for field use by a wider range of users, and we are embarking on the integration of our time-based, hard real-time technology with industry standards and more traditional event-based soft- and non-real-time systems.
• Masix (Blaise Pascal Institute MASI Laboratory)
  Group Members: Rémy Card, Franck Mével, Julien Simon
  Related to: Mach
  Masix is a distributed operating system, based on the Mach micro-kernel, currently under development at the MASI Laboratory. Its primary goal is the simultaneous execution of multiple personalities, in order to run concurrently on a same workstation applications from the Unix, DOS, OS/2 and Win32 worlds. Furthermore, Masix pools the resources of a workstation local area network, independently from the personalities that run on each node. Masix also provides distributed services to the personalities.
• MOSIX (Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel) Group Members
  A solution to the NOW problem is now available in the form of a multicomputer operating system enhancements, called MOSIX. MOSIX is an enhancement of UNIX which allows users to use the resources of a NOW configuration, without any change to the application level. By using transparent, dynamic process migration algorithms, MOSIX enhances the network services, i.e. NFS, TCP/IP, of UNIX, to the process level, by supporting load balancing and a dynamic work distribution (leveling) in clusters of homogeneous computers.
• Plan 9 (Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center)
  Plan 9 is a new computer operating system developed at Bell Labs. It is a distributed system. In the most general configuration, it uses three kinds of components: terminals that sit on users' desks, file servers that store permanent data, and CPU servers that provide faster CPUs, user authentication, and network gateways. One of the interesting facets of Plan 9 is that it exports a file-system interface to essentially all system services.
• Puma and relatives (Sandia National Laboratory)
  The Puma operating system targets high-performance applications on tightly coupled distributed memory architectures. It is a descendant of SUNMOS.
• QNX
  A micro-kernel, distributed, real-time, fault-tolerant, POSIX-certified OS for the x86. QNX adopts the approach of implementing an OS with a 10 Kbyte micro-kernel surrounded by a team of optional processes that provide higher-level OS services. QNX is fully distributed, with all system interfaces network transparent. QNX has successfully been used in tiny ROM-based embedded systems and in several-hundred node distributed systems.
• Spring Real-Time Project (University of Massachsetts, Amherst) Group Members
  The Spring kernel has been designed and implemented to support/provide predictability, on-line dynamic guarantees, atomic guarantees, end-to-end scheduling and resource reservations. It utilizes a micro-kernel design for multiprocessor architectures and provides an interface to remote processes, support for distributed shared memory, and predictable low level communication. The kernel exists as a component of Spring's integrated environment. This environment extracts significant semantic information and this information is used at runtime to support flexibility. (ed: This is not the same as the Spring OS from Sun, which unfortunately has the same name.)
• Spring System (Sun)
  Sun's new research kernel. Spring is a highly modular, object-oriented operating system, which is focused around a uniform interface definition language. Spring is intrinsically distributed, with all system interfaces being accessible both locally and remotely.
• Sprite (University of California, Berkeley)
  Sprite was a UNIX-like distributed operating system developed at Berkeley which ran on a number of different machines, and had a number of interesting features, such as load-balancing, a high-speed, aggressively-caching, distributed file-system, and a fast log-structured local file-system. Research on Sprite per-se come to an end, although various former members of the Sprite group are carrying on aspects of the original Sprite research.
• Sting
  Sting is an experimental operating system designed to serve as an efficient customizable substrate for modern programming languages. The base language used in our current implementation is Scheme, but Sting's core ideas could be incorporated into any reasonably high-level language. The ultimate goal in this project is to build a unified programming environment for parallel and distributed computing.
• Sumo (Lancaster University)
  Related to: Chorus
  Over the past few years members of the SUMO team have been designing and implementing a microkernel based system with facilities to support distributed real-time and multimedia applications and ODP based multimedia distributed application platforms. We are interested in both communications and processing support for distributed real-time/ multimedia applications in end systems, and believe that such applications require thread-to-thread real-time support according to user supplied quality of service (QoS) parameters.
• Tao Operating System (Tao Systems) Group Members
  Tao is a radical commercial operating system or run time module offering all of the features required for the building of leading edge, cost driven, embedded consumer electronics (single and multi-processor). It is available on a broad range of processors both as a stand alone OS and co-existing with host operating systems.
• Tigger (Trinity College Dublin) Group Members
  The Tigger project is developing a framework for the construction of a family of distributed object-support platforms suitable for use in a variety of distributed applications ranging from embedded soft-real time systems to concurrent engineering frameworks. Customisability, extensibility and portability are put forward as the way to handle diversity and are thus the core design goals in Tigger.
• TUNES Group Members
  Tunes is a project to replace existing Operating Systems, Languages, and User Interfaces by a completely rethough Computing System, based on a correctness-proof-secure higher-order reflective self-extensible fine-grained distributed persistent fault-tolerant version-aware decentralized (no-kernel) object system. We want to implement such a system because we know all these are required for the computing industry to compete fairly, which is not currently possible. Even if Tunes itself does not become a world-wide OS, we hope the TUNES experience can speed up the appearance of such an OS that would fulfill our requirements.