The Inferno Distributed Operating System

Speaker: Michael Jeffrey

21st May 2003 , 11am , Room 519 Claremont Tower

Abstract

The construction of distributed systems has been hampered by the lack of a clean, perspicuous model for its components. Researchers at Bell Labs Computer Science Centre (headed by Dennis Ritchie) advocated and pushed to the limit the idea of representing all resources (physical devices, services, control points and dynamic data structures) as files. They noted that all systems (well almost) use files to represent data, arranged in a hierarchical naming scheme. Extending this scheme to encompass all resources (local and remote) makes use of a naming and classification scheme that is well understood not just by programmers but lay people as well. This seminar provides an introduction to the Inferno operating system which makes use of this idea and demonstrates how it can be used in the construction of distributed (Grid) systems. During the course of the seminar there will be a demonstration of a distributed system encompassing a range of computing devices, large and small.