Barrelfish

"Barrelfish is a new research operating system being built from scratch and released by ETH Zurich in Switzerland, originally in collaboration with Microsoft Research and now partly supported by HP Enterprise Labs, Huawei, Cisco, Oracle, and VMware. We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems. We are 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.

Barrelfish is a research operating system being developed collaboratively by researchers in the Systems Group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and at Microsoft Research. It is intended as a vehicle for exploring ideas about the structure of operating systems for hardware of the future. We anticipate the main challenges for operating systems will be scalability as the number of cores increases, and in dealing with processor and system heterogeneity. We have proposed a radically different way of structuring an operating system to address these challenges. Barrelfish is an implementation of our proposal, for "proof of concept", and for giving us a concrete foundation with which to extend our research in this area – for example we are also looking at an asynchronous programming model, a parallel file system etc.

Barrelfish is written from scratch, almost all in C or assembler, and it runs on x86 platforms, with ports to various other platforms in progress."

http://www.barrelfish.org/