Software News - Microsofts multicore OS barrelfish

[va!n]

Barrelfish is a new operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between researchers at ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research, Cambridge. We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems. The motivation is two closely related hardware trends: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to scalability challenges, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.

For more information about the Barrelfish project and operating system please see http://www.barrelfish.org (a server running the Barrelfish operating system).

Source: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/Barrelfish/

[Shockwave]

This is certainly an exciting development for a couple of reasons, obviously it will be some time before programmers exploit the technology.

What is brilliant about it is that it will bring down the prices of current top spec gear so there should be some good deals to be had when this stuff hits the mass market.

[combatking0]

Hopefully this will be the start of mainstream parallel programs. I'm still getting my head around that.

The question on everybody's lips is - what colour screen of death will this new M$ OS bring?

[Moroboshisan]

The question on everybody's lips is - what colour screen of death will this new M$ OS bring?

YEAH!... good question that is! ^_^

[Shockwave]

It would be nice to have a gradiented background of death

[combatking0]

A 100-core CPU should be capable of rendering that.

[slinks]

Maybe even a full demo-scene routine?

[Stonemonkey]

Maybe even a full demo-scene routine?

Now there's an idea for a compo.