From: Distributed systems

See the section on `available software' for information on
distributions of some of the systems mentioned here.

- The Amoeba project is still going.  There are roughly 20 people
  working on it, but most of these are no longer kernel hackers.  They
  are working on using it for parallel programming, wide-area
  distributed systems, and other things.  Amoeba is used in over 100
  universities at the moment, and is also used at commercial
  institutions.

- Brazil is the new research operating system being developed at AT&T
  Bell Labs.  Research topics being addressed in Brazil center on
  higher-performance machines and, particularly, networks. A new
  in-house 300 megabit/s switched fiber network increases the
  potential bandwidth between machines by at least an order of
  magnitude; our aim is to realize and exploit that bandwidth. The
  overall design is to eliminate unnecessary overhead, particularly by
  restructuring and redesigning where necessary to avoid copying data
  from element to element along the communications path.  Most of this
  software (except the operating system kernel) is written in a new
  concurrent systems programming language, Alef, which makes it easy
  to write multi-process servers and applications that can communicate
  using messages or shared memory, as appropriate.  A paper on Alef is
  available from the Plan 9 ftp site; see part 2 of this FAQ for a
  pointer.

- Cronus is still under development at BBN.  The current public
  release is 3.0.  The project currently has two thrusts---as the base
  for advanced distributed system R&D, and as a platform for
  constructing and deploying sophisticated distributed applications.

  Ongoing research topics include the integration of Cronus and Mach
  technology, the exploration of techniques for the construction of
  WAN-based and multi-organisational applications, investigation into
  the integration of distributed systems and network management
  systems, and work in high-performance distributed computing.

- Horus is being developed by the same group that worked on Isis; the
  head of this group is Robbert van Renesse.

- Isis is no longer being developed at Cornell; it is now managed as a
  commercial product.

- Mach is no longer being developed at CMU.  Current work on Mach is
  being carried out by the OSF Research Institute and at the
  University of Utah.

- Plan 9 is no longer in development at AT&T Bell Labs.  fibre-optic
  network.  The operating systems research group at Bell Labs has
  moved on to a new project, called Brazil, which addresses portable
  computing and distributed applications programming.

- QNX is a commercial POSIX-certified realtime OS with an installed
  base of over 250,000 systems.  It is used extensively in process
  control, factory automation, medical instrumentation, communications
  and point-of-sale.  A number of universities are also doing research
  with QNX.

- The Sprite network operating system project has ended.