[Discuss] Whence distributed operating systems?

[David Rosenstrauch]

On 04/21/2016 12:50 AM, Mike Small wrote:
>
> After the meeting I was discussing this issue with a friend. It's not an
> original criticism I didn't suppose, so I found someone with better
> words to sum up my reaction:
>
> "Sadly it seems that we now need to either wait for Linux or Windows to
> catch up with the 1980s state of the art in distributed systems (think
> Locus or AFS). What went wrong? Products like DataSynapse’s FabricServer
> look like an interesting attempt to address the problem, at least for
> the Java world, but it feels to me that mainstream operating systems
> designers seem to have lost the plot somewhere along the way."
>
> http://discovery.bmc.com/community/blog-post/whatever-happened-to-distributed-operating-systems3/
>
> Is single system image still a thing?

Aren't systems like Apache Mesos (which didn't exist back nearly 10 
years ago in 2007 when the author wrote that post) the natural successor 
to DataSynapse FabricServer, and an example of the "distibuted operating 
system" he's talking about?  I.e., just a big pool of CPU cores, where 
different portions of the pool can be utilized for different types of 
distributed workloads.

DR