Service-oriented Operating Systems

Processor and network architectures are making rapid progress with more and more cores being integrated into single processors and more and more machines getting connected with increasing bandwidth. Processors become heterogeneous and reconfigurable, thus allowing for dynamic adaptation to specialised needs. In future, thousands of billions of devices may be connected to form a single computing unit.

No current programming model is able to cope with this development, though, as they essentially still follow the classical van Neumann model. Furthermore, complex, non-aligned middlewares and operating systems render distributed applications unnecessarily inefficient. In order to realise efficient programmability of terascale devices by experts and average developers equally, a complete new approach to handling these types of devices across all layers is required:

The S(o)OS project addressed future distributed systems on the level of a holistic operating system architecture by drawing from Service Oriented Architectures and the strength of Grids. This decouples the OS from the underlying resource infrastructure, thus making execution across an almost unlimited number of varying devices possible, independent from the actual hardware.