Project News

18/02/2010 Project Kickoff

The S(o)OS project had its official kickoff meeting in Aveiro (Portugal)

Given the fast movement in current state of the art development and, more worryingly, the tendency towards diverging approaches in the varying computer development sectors, it can be foreseen that in a few years time application developers will have to cater for in-depth resource details if they want to make efficient use of the hardware. Already certain symptoms of this tendency are visible in the High Performance Computing domain, but with the growing number of cores in home PCs, similar developments will become visible there.

The consortium discussed in-depth how and which areas that participate in the development of (future) computing systems influence the management overhead for developers and system administrators. Currently, specialised systems can only be effectively managed by specialised developers and not by the average developer. Accordingly, a strong project focus must rest on the common developer and user needs, as they can be foreseen within the next 10-20 years - this involves the whole spectrum from office applications (word processors, slide show presentations etc.) to integration and manipulation of multimedia streams and even gaming.

On the other hand, high performance computing, the telecommunication industry etc. all have specialised requirements towards computing / data infrastructures which are not properly met by nowadays systems, thus leading to diverging and, more particulary, to contradicting approaches. In order to bring these areas back together again, thus allowing cross-domain usage of capabilities, a common approach is needed that respects these extreme use cases, too.

The project will hence start with an in-depth analysis of the current state of the art and the trends towards future application needs from different perspectives. In particular the operating system is expected to be affected by these developments and by applying a bottom-up approach towards modern OS architectures, a principally scale independent concept will be developed, similarly to how monolithic systems developed a principally hardware independent concept - namely through modularity (of hardware, OS and software)

The S(o)OS Consortium in Aveiro

The kickoff was hosted by the Institute of Telecommunication at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. We could feel the remnants of the storm hitting Madeira on the 20th of February and the consortium wants to express its sympathies to all parties affected.