reggie@pdn.uucp (George W. Leach) (01/22/88)
[ This looks like real good stuff. Perhaps some of these folks that George ]
[ has contacted can be persuaded to contribute a description of their system? ]
Here is the summary of the information that was sent in response to
my inquiry concerning distributed systems. First, I would like to thank
the following individuals who replied:
Michel Gien (chorus.fr!mg) Chorus Systemes, Montigny-le-Bretonneux, France
Preston Bannister (felix!preston) FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa CA
Ken Birman (cornell!ken) Cornell University CS Dept, Ithaca NY
(paf@sdcsvax) University of California, San Diego CA
Fred Douglis (ginger.berkeley.edu!douglis) University of California,
Berkeley CA
H. Stephen Au-Yeung (tolerant!stephen) Tolerant Systems, Inc., San Jose CA
Dave Wagner (uw-beaver!wagner) University of Washington, Seattle WA
Rich A. Hammond (bellcore!hammond) Bell Communications Research,
Morristown NJ
I would also like to further thank Michel Gien, Ken Birman, Fred
Douglis, and H. Stephen Au-Yeung for following up on my further requests
for printed matter on their respective systems.
Although my original inquiry was directed at acquiring information
on Distributed UNIX or UNIX-like systems, I also received at least one reply
concerning a network file system. In addition, I received and gathered
information on distributed operating systems. Perhaps the wording of my
original posting should have been clearer. I was looking for information
on distributed operating systems and only meant to use distributed UNIX or
UNIX-like as an example! For example, I am also aware of some distributed
object-oriented operating systems/environments that have been worked on, eg.
Allegro at U. of Stanford or Eden and U. of Washington.
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Provided below is a summary of various projects or systems that
I have compiled. Where the information is know a contact is provided
along with an e-mail address is one was available.
Project Organization Contact
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mach Carnegie-Mellon University Rich F. Rashid
DUNIX Bell Communications Research A. Litman
DUNE Bellcore/Princeton U. Luis Cova
princeton!cova
UNIX United U. of Newcastle upon Tyne Brian Randell
Newcastle Connection U. of Newcastle upon Tyne Brian Randell
Cambridge Ring University of Kent R.P.A. Collinson
LOCUS UCLA & Locus Computing Corp. Gerald J. Popek
Amoeba Vrije Universiteit Andrew S. Tanenbaum
botter!ast
V Stanford University D.R. Cheriton
Eden U of Wash. (Rice U.) Guy T. Almes
rice!almes
NEST AT&T BTL, Murray Hill NJ Rakesh Agrawal
allegra!rakesh
COCANET U of California - Berkeley L.A. Rowe
Project Athena MIT/DEC James Gettys
jumbo!jg
Andrew CMU ITC/IBM James H. Morris
NM State Ring New Mexico State University Arthur I. Karshmer
MOS Hebrew U of Jerusalem Amnon Barak
PULSE University of York G.M. Tomlinson
Allegro Stanford University Mark A. Linton
lurch.stanford.edu!linton
Chorus Chorus Systems Michel Gien
chorus!mg
FileNet FileNet Corporation Martin McKenery
felix!martin
ARGUS MIT Barbara Liskov
CLOUDS Georgia Tech Richard LeBlanc
gatech!rich
Sprite U of California - Berkeley Fred Douglis
sloth.berkeley.edu!douglis
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Date: Tue, 29 Dec 87 20:49:07 +0100
From: rutgers!chorus.fr!mg (Michel Gien)
Organization: Chorus Systemes, Montigny-le-Bretonneux, France
To: moss!codas!pdn!reggie
Subject: Re: Distributed UNIX information request
Yes, you ought to look into CHORUS....:-)
Seriously, Chorus has been a research Project on Distributed Systems at
INRIA in France from 1979 to 1986. Going through three iterations, referred
to as CHORUS-V0, CHORUS-V1, and CHORUS-V2, all based on a message passing
kernel. CHORUS basic concepts for handling distribution are "Ports" and
"Messages". System as well as Application services are provided by means of
processes (called Actors), communicating by exchanging messages.
CHORUS-V2 is UNIX compatible, at the object code level. It supports all
standard Unix programs, in a distributed environment.
Files, devices, processor resources, etc., distributed over several machines
on a LAN, can be accesssed in the same way, and with the same programs, as
on a conventional Unix system. CHORUS provide transparent access
to "distributed names" that can be associated with any type of service
and/or resource, rather than to a specific set of particular remote
resources as does NFS for example with files.
In december 1986, most of the researchers that had been working on the
Chorus research project formed a Company called Chorus syste`mes to
further develop, industrialize and market CHORUS on a commercial basis.
The current version, being developped by Chorus syste`mes, is called
CHORUS-V3. Its main features are:
1. Unix compatibility for user programs is at the EXECUTABLE code level,
with other Unix systems running on the same hardware (assuming same
compilers and linker), i.e. Unix application executables can be run
unchanged on CHORUS-V3.
2. The Unix interface supported includes POSIX, System V (X/OPEN) and
4.3 BSD/SUN extensions (sockets, NFS).
3. Distributed Virtual Memory will be provided with object (e.g. files)
mapping into memory over the network.
4. Actors (i.e. processes) can be "multiplexed" into several "activities"
(i.e. "threads" ala Mach), sharing the actor's resources.
5. Unix modularity of user programs has been extended to system
services: file, process, network management, device drivers,
etc. are implemented as "standard" actors, and are not part of the
kernel. Therefore, only those system functions actually required need
to be installed. They can be complemented or reduced dynamically while
the system is running.
In particular, drivers can be installed, changed or removed on-line...
This provides extremely powerful tools for dynamically optimising
distributed system configurations to evolving application requirements.
(This is currently supported by CHORUS-V2).
6. The CHORUS kernel itself is implemented as a "multi-threads actor" and
"user-level" threads can be dynamically attached to the kernel.
7. User procedures may also be attached dynamically to interrupt vectors to
allow efficient handling of interrupts, thus providing tools for real-time
applications.
8. Unix compatibility is also provided at drivers level, allowing to port
such drivers at very low-cost.
9. Portability of the system has been considerably improved by means of
careful study of various hardware architectures, increased modularity of
the system components and programming language used for implementation
(C++ and C).
10. Quality assurance methods are being used for development of the system
software (in C++).
Compared to other distributed systems, one could possibly "summarize" (???)
CHORUS as a mixture of (best of (!!!)) V-system (message passing kernel),
Mach (Virtual Memory and Threads), Amoeba (network addresssing) and Locus
(although CHORUS hasn't gone as far yet as regards file replication in
particular). And of course Unix compatibility...
A first release of CHORUS-V3 is planed to be available for beta-testing
3Q-88, on Bull/SPS-7, SUN-3, and PC/AT-386.
I am mailing you a set of papers on CHORUS, most reflecting CHORUS-V2
architecture. I should be able to mail you CHORUS-V3 papers pretty soon.
Hope this is usefull information to you.
Thanks again for your interest. I am of course very much interested in
the other replies you've got from other people working on similar
subjects.
_ _ _ _ Michel Gien
' ) ) ) / // Chorus systemes
/ / / o _. /_ _ // 6 avenue Gustave Eiffel
/ ' (_<_(__/ /_</_</_ F-78180, Montigny-le-Bretonneux (France)
Tel: +33 (1) 30 57 00 22 Fax: +33 (1) 30 57 00 66
mg@chorus.fr (Internet) {uunet}!mcvax!inria!chorus!mg (old uucp)
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Date: Thu, 24 Dec 87 11:55:27 pst
From: ihnp4!hplabs!felix!preston (Preston Bannister)
To: hplabs!ihnp4!codas!pdn!reggie
Subject: Re: Distributed UNIX information request
Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA
FileNet uses a version of Unix version 7 with a distributed file
system. Hopefully you will get some mail from one of the OS people
here. If not then you might try sending mail to edwards or martin on
this machine.
Login name: edwards In real life: Dave Edwards
Project: Operating System Group (OSG) Manager
Login name: martin In real life: Martin McKendry
The FileNet system is a collection of 680x0 based boxes on an Ethernet
all sharing the same filesystem. Our product is a system for storing
and using very large numbers of documents. Each box may have a
scanner, optical disk jukebox, laser printer, or very high resolution
(1700x1200) display attached. The first product shipped over two years
ago, so this is not a new development. There are people (Martin in
particular) working on improving the performance of the system.
--
Preston L. Bannister
USENET : ucbvax!trwrb!felix!preston
BIX : plb
CompuServe : 71350,3505
GEnie : p.bannister
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Date: Fri, 25 Dec 87 15:17:20 EST
From: rutgers!rochester!cornell!ken (Ken Birman)
To: moss!codas!pdn!reggie
Subject: Re: Distributed UNIX information request
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
If you include ARGUS as a UNIX-like system, you probably ought
to include ISIS (my system), CLOUDS (G. Tech), and perhaps
the arizona system, SUGUARO (?sp).
Actually, I suspect that neither ARGUS nor V really
belong on your list. What are you compiling this information
for?
Ken
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 87 20:26:15 EST
From: rutgers!kama.cs.cornell.edu!cornell!ken (Ken Birman)
To: moss!codas!pdn!reggie
Subject: Re: distributed os.
Yes, we do have more written material. As a matter of fact, we plan
to release the ISIS system for SUN computers sometime this spring,
probably in March. It comes with an extensive manual, and public-domain
style support, but might be a good testbed for a project like yours.
Performance is remarkably good for something on top of UNIX as long
as you use the system for the things that it is good at.
I'll have my secretary mail your our current papers, plus a recent
one on the RNFS (no current plans to distribute it, I should mention,
but this could change). If you are interested in running ISIS on your
SUN systems, let me know.
Ken Birman
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Subject: Re: Distributed UNIX information request
Date: 26 Dec 87 18:33:20 GMT
You might contact Plexus Computers. They developed (and sold) the
first comercial Distributed File system in 1982-3 for System-III.
This was a rmount model with state information. The designer was
Monte Pickard, now at Counterpoint computers.
[ This is mostly of historical interest, but I would like to hear more ]
[ about it if Monte is somewhere on the net. --DL ]
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From: Fred Douglis <rutgers!ginger.berkeley.edu!douglis>
To: ginger.berkeley.edu!gabato
Cc: moss!codas!pdn!reggie, sdcsvax.ucsd.edu!darrell%beowulf
Subject: please send Sprite Packet
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 87 13:58:19 PST
Sender: rutgers!sloth.berkeley.edu!douglis
Liza, once you get back, can you please send the packet to:
George W. Leach
Paradyne Corporation
Mail stop LF-207
P.O. Box 2826
Largo, FL 34649-2826
Thanks,
- Fred -
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Date: Thu, 24 Dec 87 08:29:38 pst
From: rutgers!ucbvax.berkeley.edu!ames!oliveb!tolerant!stephen (H. Stephen Au-Yeung)
To: moss!codas!pdn!reggie
Subject: Re: Distributed UNIX information request
We, at Tolerant Systems, are developing a fault tolerance distributed
UNIX called TX. If you are interested, let me know, I'd see if I can
find some printed material to send to you.
Stephen Au-Yeung
Tolerant Systems, Inc.
81 E. Daggett Drive
San Jose, CA. 95134
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 87 22:08:18 pst
From: rutgers!pangaea.berkeley.edu!tolerant!stephen (H. Stephen Au-Yeung)
To: ames!ames!rutgers.edu!moss!codas!pdn!reggie
Subject: TX
George,
I'll see if I can send you some papers about our OS after this
holidays. Yes, TX is designed and implemented by Tolerant Systems and
we've sold our source code to several companies all over the world. As
I might have told you before, TX is based on 4.2 BSD UNIX and we added
the support for on line transaction processing and fault tolerance. To
make this possible, some modules of the OS have been rewritten, e.g.,
the file system. Anyway, wait for more details.
Stephen Au-Yeung
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Date: Fri, 25 Dec 87 14:05:44 PST
From: usfvax2!gould!uunet!seismo.CSS.GOV!harvard!uw-beaver!uw-june!wagner (Bullwinkle J. Moose)
To: gould!novavax!usfvax2!pdn!reggie%seismo.CSS.GOV
Subject: Distributed UNIX
There is a system called DUNIX that was developed at Bell Communications
Research by Ami Litman. I only have a BCR tech report on it, so I don't
know if it was ever published anywhere. To my understanding, it's a
complete re-write of UNIX, not just a bunch of hacks.
The author's address is BCR, 435 South Street, Morristown, New Jersey, 07960.
For a reference to a predecessor of DUNIX, see A. Barak and A. Litman, "MOS:
A Multicomputer Distributed Operating System", in Sofware Practice and
Experience, vol 15(8), pp. 725-737, August, 1985. This work was done at
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Hope this helps.
___ _ ____ _ ___
/ \__/ \__/ \__/ \__/ \ Hey Rocky!
| _|@ @ __ | Watch me pull a rabbit
\________/ | | \________/ out of my hat!
__/ _/
/) (o _/
\____/
Dave Wagner
University of Washington Comp Sci Department
wagner@cs.washington.edu
{ihnp4,harvard,tektronix}!uw-beaver!wagner
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 87 11:27:01 est
From: rutgers!lafite.bellcore.com!hammond (Rich A. Hammond)
To: moss!codas!pdn!reggie
Subject: Other Distributed Unix Systems
We have 2 distribtued UNIX systems projects here at Bellcore
in the applied research area. DUNIX is a distribtued UNIX with
an orientation towards availability in the face of processor
failures. It is based on large Vaxen (Unibus or BI bus based machines).
Dune (internal name, haven't any idea about official name)
is oriented towards making use of lots of fast, cheap processors,
it uses 68020 based VME/multibus boards.
Let me know if this gets through and you want more info.
I know the DUNIX stuff is somewhat available, at least to universities.
Rich Hammond Bell Communications Research, (201) 829-4383
hammond@bellcore.com