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By John Breeden II, Greg Crowe, Trudy Walsh
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Microsoft offers first shot of Barrelfish operating system
Microsoft has released the first snapshot of the Barrelfish operating system, an OS written specifically for multicore environments.
The Barrelfish team, a group of researchers from Microsoft Research Cambridge and the technology university ETH Zurich, says it is “motivated by two closely related trends in hardware design: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.”
Early rumors are that the OS will be open source and free. This first snapshot release of the code is under a copyright held by ETH Zurich and Microsoft. The full research paper is available here.
For more information, see www.barrelfish.org.
Posted by Trudy Walsh on Sep 29, 2009 at 2:59 PM