Computing Fabrics (1998-2003)

On May 19, 2003: Eric Lundquist, Editor-in-Chief of eWeek, recognized that IBM's On-Demand Computing, HP's Adaptive Enterprise, and Sun's N1 are all movements towards Computing Fabrics as we first predicted them in 1998.

On January 7, 2002: eWeek called our 1998 Computing Fabrics Cover Story "Prescient"
and declared The Grid, a subset of Computing Fabrics, "The Next Big Thing".

Riding the
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In the News 2002-2004

Computing's Next Wave 1998
(The First Report)

The Next Big Thing 2002
Computing Fabrics & Grids

The Three Waves of Computing

Architecture

Defined & Compared

Resources

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Computing's Next Wave
Computing Fabrics Stories - 1998

Full Text of Selected Infomaniacs' Guides, Analyses, and Reviews
Distributed UNIX Soon May Be Woven into the NT Fabric
By Erick Von Schweber and Linda Von Schweber
PC Week Online October 26, 1998 3:44 PM ET


Cover Story

Microsoft Corp. appears to be exploring a surprising strategy: licensing distributed Unix technology from Silicon Graphics Inc. The technology could be used to enhance NT's kernel, enabling the operating system to support thousands of processors and participate in the future of Computing Fabrics.
 
Related Stories
Computing's Next Wave
(in print and on-line)
This is the main story.
Distributed UNIX Soon May Be Woven into the NT Fabric
(in print and on-line)
Computing Fabrics to Refashion Industry
(on-line only)
The Technologies of Computing Fabrics
(on-line only)
Beleaguered by Windows NT 5.0 delays and the uncertain future of enterprise-class NT clustering, Microsoft Corp. appears to be exploring a surprising strategy: licensing distributed Unix technology from Silicon Graphics Inc. The technology could be used to enhance NT's kernel, enabling the operating system to support thousands of processors and participate in the future of Computing Fabrics.

Although Microsoft wouldn't comment on the talks, SGI officials would. "We have been in discussion about ways to bring our technologies together that will really help both of us," said Forrest Basket, chief technology officer at SGI, in Mountain View, Calif. Specifically, Basket said, SGI is in discussions to license technology from its Cellular Irix operating system to Microsoft.

Such a deal would allow Microsoft to run NT on SGI's upcoming SN1, a Computing Fabric system that will incorporate more than 1,000 Intel Merced processors. To achieve this goal, Microsoft must push NT toward distributed processing.

Cellular Irix, a distributed version of SGI's Unix, is currently in development, with release targeted for the first quarter of 2000. The new version promises to support a single address space across more than 1,000 tightly coupled processors. Cellular Irix would do that by defining cells of processors and allocating processors and memory to them. No other general-purpose version of Unix approaches this level of scalability while maintaining a single system image. Sun's Solaris, by comparison, currently supports no more than 64 processors.

Microsoft's own efforts in the area of Computing Fabrics complement, rather than duplicate, SGI's cellular operating system technology. Microsoft, in its Millennium project, has focused on achieving tight coupling of systems with distributed object software.

The Millennium project, led by Rich Draves, of Mach operating system fame, would allow for the automatic distribution of objects of COM+ (Component Object Model+) programs across systems of thousands of processors without requiring any special programming at the application level.

Now working on the project's third phase, called Continuum, Draves' group is applying to COM+ lessons learned from earlier prototypes based on Java and COM.

Coupled with COM-compliant Cellular Irix, Millennium could help Microsoft distance itself from its NT woes and help it leapfrog Unix competitors.

Microsoft and SGI are already sharing many technologies. The companies agreed earlier this year to jointly develop Fahrenheit, a next-generation three-dimensional graphics architecture based on SGI technology. And SGI recently agreed to support Microsoft's COM architecture--in addition to CORBA--in Irix.

By licensing Cellular Irix technologies and integrating them with the NT kernel and Millennium, Microsoft could finally provide enterprise-class, highly scalable distributed processing while retaining control over Windows services, GUIs, programming interfaces and the NTFS file system.

Copyright (c) 1998 Ziff-Davis Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Erick Von Schweber is Chief Science Officer for Infomaniacs, a think tank in Sedona, Ariz specializing in technology convergence.. Linda Von Schweber is Chief Creative Officer for Infomaniacs. They can be contacted at thinktank@infomaniacs.com or www.infomaniacs.com.

Copyright © 1998 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company

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Updated Dec 2, 1998

 

 

By Linda Von Schweber
& Erick Von Schweber

Copyright 1996-2004 by Infomaniacs. All Rights Reserved.
Updated May 28, 2003