SwarmOS

(Courtesy SwarmLab)

The TerraSwarm SwarmOS Task [Jones, Kubiatowicz, Lee, Rabaey, Wawrzynek, Wessel] will develop the SwarmOS that will serve as a distributed executive and resource manager for TerraSwarm applications. The SwarmOS will mediate the needs of applications for services and clusters of resources where resource clusters may be, for example, a portion of a processor's resources, or a slice of bandwidth. We refer to guaranteed resource clusters as cells. The SwarmOS must be distributed, resource aware, governed by service-level contracts, capable of restricting admission and of guaranteeing access to critical services. It must function in a heterogeneous network, where multiple technologies are combined and where connectivity may be disrupted or only available sporadically.

The SwarmOS will provide a cross-platform implementation of the cell concept, exploiting hardware mechanisms for resource isolation, security, and metering where available. Building on cells, the SwarmOS will provide a variety of standard system services as well as mechanisms for service advertisement and discovery. The outcome of this task will be an operational prototype of the SwarmOS.

The SwarmOS mediates services between Swarm Resources and Swarmlets (Ptolemy II MoML version)

Public Resources

• See the SwarmLab page for information about the Global Data Plane.
• Eric Allman, Alec Dara-Abrams, Nikhil Goyal, Jack Kolb, John D. Kubiatowicz, John Wawrzynek, Nitesh Mor, Ben Zhang, Ken Lutz. The Global Data Plane: Looking Forward, 29, October, 2014; Poster presented at the 2014 TerraSwarm Annual Meeting

TerraSwarm-only Resources

The resources below are available to TerraSwarm members. Membership in the TerraSwarm SwarmOS workgroup is available only to TerraSwarm members, see Who can get an account?

• This is the public page for SwarmOS. See the SwarmOS Wiki for internal information specific to software development.
• Meetings: The SwarmOS meetings happen regularly (see the TerraSwarm Calendar) and our available via Teleconferencing to TerraSwarm members. We are using this mailing list because the other mailing list does not forward the ReadyTalk invitations.
• See the Platforms Wiki for meeting agendas.
• See also the Global Data Plane Wiki.
• SwarmOS Repository Instructions: We have a Git repo for use as a sandbox for exploration (Internal use only)

News

• April 4, 2016: Nitesh Mor. Global Data Plane: Concepts and Getting Started, Tutorial.
• Thursday, May 29, 2014: SwarmOS Workshop, Berkeley. (TerraSwarm members only)
• April 11, 2014: Edward A. Lee. A Vision of the TerraPlane; Presented at the Theme 2 Platforms teleconference.
• John D. Kubiatowicz. Swarming toward the Internet of Things, September 29, 2013 2013; Presented at the First International Workshop on the Swarm at the Edge of the Cloud (SEC'13 @ ESWeek), Montreal.
• Jan Rabaey, "Swarm Visions," FISC Symposium, Maynooth, March, 2012. Mentions "Swarm-OS."
• For information about Swarms, see: SwarmLab Swarm History

Prior work and other Swarm OSs

• Richard E. Morley, Dick Morley, "Techshock Caution: Future Under Repair," 2009. Mentions that work on "Swarm OS" happened at the Santa Fe Institute, possibly in the 1980's.
• http://swarm.org: "Swarm is a kernel and library for the multi-agent simulation of complex systems. The basic architecture of Swarm is a collection of concurrently interacting agents: within this architecture, a large variety of agent based models can be implemented. "
• Abdelzaher, T., Blum B., Evans D., George J., George S., Huang, C., Nagaraddi P., Sorokin P., Stankovic, J., "SwarmOS: A Distributed Computing System for Sensor Networks," University of Virginia. Last updated 15-Aug-2002.