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Operating Systems of the Future

Posted by timothy on from the at-last-nirvana dept.

An anonymous reader writes: "'Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration.' Computerworld is predicting that over the next 10 years, operating systems will become highly distributed and 'self-healing,' and they'll collaborate with applications, making application programmers' jobs easier."

3 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Amoeba by oyving · · Score: 5, Informative

    Tanenbaums Amoeba is way ahead of the game then.

  2. As long as... by BoarderPhreak · · Score: 5, Informative
    ...This software isn't like Office X from Microsoft on the Mac where it scans your network for anti-piracy measures, but in the process opens up your machine wide to the Internet by opening several ports... Worse yet, not tell anyone about it!

    Grumble, grumble...

  3. Re:Scalability problems, anyone? by Salamander · · Score: 5, Informative
    Surely there will be major scalability problems with something like this, a la Gnutella

    That's why it's research. I've met and talked to Bill Bolosky (Farsite project lead); he's very clueful wrt scalability in general, and well aware of the problems that networks like Gnutella (an unusually naive protocol, BTW) have run into. However, like the folks working on OceanStore or CFS or many other projects, the Farsite folks have a fairly formidable arsenal of innovative techniques they can apply to the problem. The details are still being worked out, of course, because that's what research is all about, but the people working in this area do seem to be making real progress toward solutions that could scale to such levels.

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