November 19th, 2009

Microsoft still working on an Adobe Lightroom competitor, but with a social twist

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:28 am

Categories: Code names, Corporate strategy, Research

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Adobe Lightroom, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp., SmartFlow, Microsoft FUSE, FUSE Lab, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing

It’s been almost two years since I first got tips about Microsoft “SmartFlow,” a product which allegedly was going to be a competitor with Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom post-production software for professional photographers. I had thought that incubation project may have been quietly eliminated somewhere along the way.

However, during an interview I had with Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie this week at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, I discovered work is going foward on SmartFlow — but in a new part of the company and with a new twist.

SmartFlow is now one of the projects under the recently-created Microsoft FUSE social-computing lab, Ozzie said. The 82-person Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs will be headed by General Manager Lili Cheng. FUSE is an amalgamation of Cheng’s Microsoft Research (MSR) Creative Systems group and two other labs that are already under Ozzie: Rich Media Labs, in Redmond, Wash., and Starup Labs, based in Cambridge, Mass.

“Cheng’s got — it wasn’t really written about a lot, but there was a project under (former Chief Technical Officer) David Vaskevitch called SmartFlow,” Ozzie told me. The FUSE Lab is bringing together people who are really great about the communications aspect of social (networking) and the media aspects. And so I’m really excited to see some of the ideas that they have in the realm of using photos, videos, and communications kind of brought together.”

After spending quite a bit of time behind the scenes with the Windows Azure team, helping that group to coalesce, Ozzie is now dedicating more of his time to other projects at the company, especially FUSE, he said this week.

SmartFlow “was heading toward Lightroom, and then we realized from the perspective of the direction of where it was going … that there’s more excitement about what people are doing,” Ozzie elaborated. “Photography has been transformed by what people are doing with camera phones a lot more than the high-end phones. I mean, I have my DSLR kinds of things, but I just think what every may is doing with photos and using it in the context of the communications is a lot more interesting and video is quite untapped, I think at this point.”

Like other Microsoft Labs, such as Live Labs, Office Labs and Ad Labs, there’s no promise that any of the incubations upon which Cheng and her team members are working will necessarily result in commercialized products. Ozzie didn’t offer up more specifics or a timetable as to when SmartFlow may be available to the public in test or final form. But once the cover is raised on SmartFlow, it will be interesting to see what social networking will bring to photo editing.

(A related aside: Vaskevitch, the former Microsoft CTO with the company’s Server and Tools group, quietly left Microsoft in September, I realized only today when searching for his title for this post. Vaskevitch had been with Microsoft since 1986 and had held a variety of marketing and strategy positions at the company.)

November 18th, 2009

Pivot: Microsoft's experiment to 'view the Web as a web'

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 3:10 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Internet Explorer, PDC 2009, Research

Tags: Web, Microsoft Corp., Pivot, Channel Management, Marketing, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s Live Labs — its Research and MSN mash-up — fielded a new test project on November 18 known as “Pivot.”

Pivot (not to be confused with Microsoft’s recently renamed PowerPivot) is meant to combine search, browsing and recommendations to create a more unified Web experience, according to a description on the Live Labs Web site.

Another way the team is describing the goal of the Pivot project is to enable users to view the Web as a “web” rather than a series of isolated pages. Pivot is to allow users to visualize hidden patterns so they can “discover new insights while interacting with thousands of things at once,” according to the Web site.

Microsoft is making a limited technical preview of Pivot available to a set of invited testers. The team is counting on developers to extend the “Collections” that are central to the Pivot technology. Collections, as the Pivot team explains on the Web site, are combinations of large groups of similar items on the Web that allow users to “begin viewing the relationships between individual pieces of information in a new way.”

Collection files are CXML and Deep Zoom-formatted (DZC) images. According to the site, “depending on whether the user browses web pages or collections, the Pivot client will either use the embedded IE rendering engine (Trident) or the collection browser to display the files.”

The download site for Live Labs’ Pivot is here. Pivot “runs best” on a Windows 7 PC with Aero Glass enabled and requires .Net 3.5 Service Pack 1 and Internet Explorer 8, but it also runs on Windows Vista. It is available in English only for now.

The fine print: “Intel integrated chipsets cannot run this application and you may see a failure during install or once you are using Pivot. Other graphics cards that are not new or do not have dedicated VRAM may show unpredictable behavior including crashes, visual artifacts, or failures in installation. We may not be able to do much about these failures if you hit them with this build, but tell us about what you are seeing and we can prioritize improving this area for the future.”

Update: One of my tipsters said Pivot is the project that was formerly codenamed “Seahorse.” I’ll ask Microsoft and see if they’ll confirm or deny. Sounds like I have some very good sources, as one of my Talkback posters (Live Labs chief Gary Flake) says himself.

November 12th, 2009

PDC 2009: Tune in for our live blogging frenzy next week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:31 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Big Brains, Multicore/distributed computing, Office 2010/Office 14, PDC 2009, Red Dog, Research, Silverlight (wpf/e), Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server")

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Professional Developers Conference Keynote, Blogging, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 kicks off the week of November 16. Like we did last year, a handful of us Microsoft watchers will be live blogging the keynotes as a group.

The PDC keynotes are slated for Tuesday November 17 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PT and Wednesday November 18 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. We’ll be using CoverItLive to blog, so the more of you who chime in and comment along with us, the merrier. Your group-blogging hosts (besides me) will be Ed Bott, Kip Kniskern, Paul Thurrott, Rafael Rivera, Tom Warren and Long Zheng

Come back here next week and watch along with us as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie; Server and Tools President Bob Muglia; Kurt DelBene, Senior VP of Microsoft’s Office Business Productivity Group and more talk about what’s coming for developers in the next year. (I’ll post the CoverItLive viewer on my site during keynote viewing hours next week.)

There will be new info on Microsoft’s Azure cloud operating environment, .Net 4.0, Oslo, Office 2010, Silverlight, SQL Server and more. And more than a few of the “Big Brains” — Microsoft’s Technical Fellows — are on tap to present during the four-day confab.  I’ve already posted about some of what’s on tap (and not on tap) for PDC 2009 over the past few weeks. Expect lots more PDC news on my blog throughout the week next week.

Hope to see you (virtually) and/or live in Los Angeles next week!

November 6th, 2009

Microsoft to show off new visualization language at PDC

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:33 pm

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, PDC 2009, Research

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Tool, Visualization Language, Vedea, MSCSS, Productivity, Blogging, Data Management, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is planning to show off a new visualization language, codenamed “Vedea” at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in mid-November.

From a blog posting by Microsoft UK Researcher Martin Calsyn.

“Vedea is a new language for creating interactive data-driven visualizations… Vedea will be demonstrated publicly for the first time at PDC 09 November 16-19 in Los Angeles and should be broadly available from research.microsoft.com shortly thereafter.”

Best I can tell, the language seems to be a project of the Microsoft Research Computational Science Laboratory. That unit is the team behind the Microsoft Compututational Science Studio (MSCSS), a “a tool for enabling non-programmer scientists and researchers to harness vast amounts of storage and compute power for running the multi-scale models that are needed to truly understand and predict complex natural systems.”

MSCSS s a shell into which you plug in extensions – for visualization, data management, computation, modelling, and more, Calsyn explained in his post. He added:

“One extension might give you access to remote data on Azure; another might allow you to draw heat-maps over Virtual Earth; and another might support Perfect Plasticity Approximation models or computations on the Hadley climate model data .”

MSCSS was one of the tools that Craig Mundie demonstrated during his university tour this past week. Mundie told the Seattle Times that tools like MSCSS would do for scientists what Excel did for business folks: Make t easier to analyze vast amounts of technical data.

I’m not sure whether Vedea is an outgrowth of an existing Microsoft Research project or something brand-new.  Microsoft showed off Vedea privately at the Microsoft Research eScience Workshop 2009 in mid-October.

There are lots of interesting directions Microsoft could take Vedea. Check out some of the visualization links on Calsyn’s blog page for references to other visualization projects, including the open-source “Processing” visualization language, which is being taught in an increasing number of universities.

November 2nd, 2009

Microsoft Live Labs shutters ThumbTack bookmarking project

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 4:15 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, MSN, Research

Tags: Team, Blog, Microsoft Corp., ThumbTack, Live Labs Team, Team Management, Blogging, Management, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s Live Labs — its MSN-Microsoft Research “mash-up” — is closing another of its incubation projects.

The latest to go is ThumbTack. ThumbTack is/was a bookmarking service (somewhat akin to Google’s Chrome bookmark sync). Microsoft describes ThumbTac on the Live Labs site this way:

“Thumbtack is an easy way to save links, photos, and anything else you can find on bunch of different Web sites to a single place. Grab the stuff you want, put it into a Thumbtack collection, then get to it from anywhere you can get online.”

I recently received a reader query about ThumbTack. The reader said he had tried to find out what was going on with the service, via customer support, to no avail.

It looks like he wasn’t the only one. Here’s a mention of the same issue on a Microsoft Live forum. And here’s a “Geeks with Blogs” blog post I found from mid-October:

“I first posted to Live Labs Customer care about not being able to generate a new link a month ago and haven’t gotten any response. Now today I can’t seem to log into Customer Care for ThumbTack.

“The Thumbtack site is just a blank page… guess shame on me for not pulling my links out of that when it started acting hinky a month ago, but the promo page is still advertising it as if it’s viable.

“I can’t find any way to contact them, so I’m throwing this blog post out in case anyone that has some knowledge can assist.”

Microsoft is confirming ThumbTack is closing. Here’s the official word, via a Live Labs spokesperson:

“It looks that Live Labs recently decided to retire the ThumbTack experiment to focus the team on some of their other projects and ideas. As you know, the team typically has a number of incubation projects in development on an ongoing basis. This is nothing out of the ordinary but just the normal course of business for the Labs as they continue to stay ahead of key trends in a changing industry.”

Earlier this year, Microsoft “restructured” Live Labs by moving half of the Live Labs team into various product groups.  The Live Labs team has closed and/or put on hold a number of its other projects in recent months, including DeepFish and Volta.

Incubation project or no, it seems odd that the ThumbTack team seems not to have told its testers about its phase-out plans. I’ve asked Microsoft what testers should do in order to get any stored data out of the service. Stay tuned….

Update (November 3): A spokesperson just sent this update as to what the team’s plans are, regarding current ThumbTack testers:

“The Live Labs group has just restored http://thumbtack.livelabs.com. Any user can now log in and get their data out.  The service has been re-enabled through the
end of the month so that anyone negatively affected can access the service.  The project will be retired at the end of November.   The group apologizes for any inconvenience caused and is working on enabling an export scenario that should be available soon.

“The Live Labs website will note the retired status of this project later in the month to reflect these changes.”

October 8th, 2009

New Microsoft social computing lab formed under Ozzie

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:36 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Research

Tags: Team, Lab, Social Computing, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp., Lili Cheng, Social Networking, Team Management, Online Communications, Marketing

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has launched another new lab, this one focused on social computing.

The 82-person Future Social Experiences Labs (FUSE) will be headed by General Manager Lili Cheng. FUSE is an amalgamation of Cheng’s Microsoft Research (MSR) Creative Systems group and two other labs that are already under Ozzie: Rich Media Labs, in Redmond, Wash., and Starup Labs, based in Cambridge, Mass. Cheng will be staying in Redmond, Microsoft officials said.

Microsoft officials aren’t sharing specifics on any of the projects on which FUSE is or will be working. The official statement:

“FUSE Labs’ team will explore new social, real-time and media-rich applications and services that add value to existing products, or could be released on their own.  By combining these teams under a single leader and mission, Ray believes FUSE Labs can achieve greater impact through tighter focus and a more holistic approach.”

Ozzie announced the new lab to his team on October 8.

Cheng has worked on a variety of Microsoft research projects and commercial products. She managed the User Experience teams for Windows Vista.  Before that, she ran the Social Computing Group within MSR, which developed projects such as Wallop and VChat,

Update: Here’s a bit more on the purpose of the lab from an e-mail that Ozzie sent to his team today:

“Myriad scenarios involving the notion of ’social’ have now gone far beyond communications and collaboration and are transforming experiences that are key to our customers and key to our business, in leisure & entertainment; productivity & teamwork; experiences extending how we use the OS itself.

“The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where ’social’ meets sharing; where ’social’ meets real-time; where ’social’ meets media; where ’social’ meets search; where ’social’ meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices.”

Kostas Mallios, the General Manager of the Rich Media Lab, will be handling development responsibilities for incubation projects in Ozzie’s organization and will continue to report to Ozzie. Reed Sturtevant, who has been Managing Director of the Startup Labs, has decided to leave the company.

October 5th, 2009

Microsoft's Midori: Who's on the all-star roster?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:11 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Multicore/distributed computing, Research, Virtualization, Windows client

Tags: Operating System, Blog, Microsoft Corp., Midori, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

It’s been a while since anything new about Microsoft’s Midori project has leaked. But thanks to a post on the “Codename Windows blog” plus a little poking around, I found an interesting list.

Microsoft officials have repeatedly refused to talk about Midori, other than to admit it is an incubation project (and with the disclaimer that it may never see the light of day). For a project that may never materialize, Midori seemingly has some heavyweight talent behind it.

First, a quick recap: Midori is all about building a new operating system that isn’t based on the current Windows kernel. Headed by Senior VIce President of Technical Strategy Eric Rudder, Midori is/was slated to be a distributed, concurrent operating system, according to various tips.

Rob Jellinghaus — a Principal Architect at Microsoft “working on an unannounced incubation project” — posted to his blog on September 11a “list of worthy programmers.” Jellinghaus doesn’t ever state that these folks are working on Midori, but he does note that he is part of a team that “working on a new operating system stack from boot loader all the way to applications. I can’t really say much more, except that what we’re doing is not entirely unrelated to the Singularity operating system.” Sure sounds like Midori to me….

Early leaks about Midori indicated Midori had roots in the Singularity microkernel operating system developed by Microsoft Research. Low and behold, a number of the programmers on Jellinghaus’ “worthy” list have worked on Singularity, as well as on other distributed operating systems, compilers and other related components. (Jellinghaus himself was “one of the first outside contributers to the Google Web Toolkit. He also worked on the Xanadu hypertext system.)

On Jellinghaus’ list:

•Daniel Lehenbauer: Describes his role on the unnamed Microsoft incubation project — which he calls the “most exciting and revolutionary work to happen in the industry since (Xerox) PARC” — as involving “the exploration of a radically different approach to the UI/Graphics platform which guarantees security, responsiveness, and leverages modern GPUs and manycore.” Software Design Engineer Lehenbauer says the incubation team of which he is a part is “revisiting every layer of the stack from device drivers, through rendering engines, up to application frameworks and programming/computation models.”

• Pavel Curtis: Software Architect, who, according to his profile on Wikipedia, “is best known for having founded and managed LambdaMOO, one of the best-known online communities of the 1990s. He created LambdaMOO during his 13-1/2 years as a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC, from 1983 to 1996, where he worked in the areas of programming language design and implementation, programming environments, and online collaboration systems.”

• Jonathan Shapiro: One of the chief developers of the BitC language and Coyotos operating system, joined the Midori team this past spring, he acknowledged in a blog post.

• Ravi Pandya:  An “Architect, Technical Strategy Incubation,” according to his blog profile. From a 2007 blog post: “I moved from Windows Security to an incubation group which is, as Chris Brumme so eloquently puts it, ‘exploring evolution and revolution in operating systems.’ I’m having a lot of fun working with a variety of interesting systems technologies, including security, distributed systems, many-core, virtualization, managed systems code, dynamic resource scheduling, asynchronous & adaptive user interfaces, etc.”

• Dean Tribble: A Principal Architect at Microsoft, Tribble led development of security and compliance features for Microsoft Exchange, and “now is incubating new operating systems technologies.”

• Chris Brumme: A Microsoft distinguished engineer who was an architect on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) team. More recently, Brumme “has been one of the architects on an unannounced systems project.”

• Bjarne Steensgard: Since 2007, has been “part of an incubation team at Microsoft that is an outgrowth of efforts started at Microsoft Research.” At Microsoft Research, he worked on the Marmot and Bartok compilers and runtime systems. (Bartok was influential in the development of Singularity, on which Steensgard also worked “since its inception,” he said. Bartok also seems to figure into the Midori picture.) Before joining Microsoft, he worked on the Emerald distributed operating system.

•David Tarditi: A former Microsoft researcher who worked on Singularity.

•Tanj Bennett: One of the 40-plus Softies running the revamped Microsoft ThinkWeek program. His area of specialization is “OS in the Future.” Bennett also seems to have a connection with a Microsoft Research project known as the “Microsoft Solver Foundation,” which is described as “a new framework and managed-code runtime for mathematical programming, modeling, and optimization.”

• Joe Duffy: The Lead Developer and Architect for Parallel Extensions to .NET. Author of the book Concurrent Programming on Windows

• Leif Kornstaedt: Worked for several years on the CLR as a developer and a senior development lead; now “work(s) in Technical Strategy Incubation.” His area of specialization, according to his Web page, is “design and implementation of a programmable middleware.” He contributed to Alice, a functional programming language, and Mozart, an implementation of the Oz language.

Midori has been in the works since 2006/2007, based on the bios of some of these individuals. But there’s no inkling of when it might emerge from incubation land. As I’ve reported before, Microsoft is working on a couple of related projects (codenamed “RedHawk” and “MinSafe”) that are supposedly pre-cursors to Midori and which could work their way, at least in part, into Windows 8.

September 29th, 2009

Microsoft's Courier tablet: A Franklin Covey planner on steroids?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:32 am

Categories: Channel, Code names, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Research, Resellers, Silverlight (wpf/e), Surface, Windows 7, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Gizmodo, Courier, Tablets, Notebooks, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Mary Jo Foley

Since the first video and photo leaks went public last week of Microsoft’s alleged second-generation Tablet PC, tipsters have been working overtime.

Since Microsoft isn’t commenting at all on Courier (the official statement is “we don’t comment on rumors or speculation”), it’s tough to separate fact from fiction at this point.

But some tipsters are a little more connected than others. And one of my connected tipsters has shared some new info with me that I’m posting now, given that it seems more verifiable.

I say “verifiable” here, not in an official sense, but based on a new Courier video clip Gizmodo posted on September 29. Gizmodo’s new clip shows more details about the journaling model around which Courier’s user interface seems to revolve. From Gizmodo’s explanation:

“The (Courier) journal can actually be published online, and it’s shown here as able to be downloaded in three formats: a Courier file, Powerpoint or PDF. There’s also a library that looks a lot like Delicious Library, where things like subscriptions, notebooks and apps, are stored.”

That sure makes the Courier sound like it fits in with Microsoft’s uber-”three screens and a cloud” vision — via which devices, TVs and PCs all share common cloud-based services, storage, etc.

The Courier journaling metaphor isn’t so different from Microsoft’s OneNote note-taking app that is currently the showcase app for existing tablet PCs, my “connected” source said. He explained:

“The concept started as a software idea on how one would really build OneNote from scratch if you could for the Tablet form factor. That then morphed into building a tablet. If you look at the most successful pocket computer today - it is still the Franklin Covey Planning Products. So, the idea was how do you create a digital planner.”

My source also claimed that the operating system underneath Courier is — at least currently — Windows 7. (That’s not as crazy as it might seem, given that the OS underlying Microsoft’s Surface is Vista — and Windows 7 is touch-enabled.)

You can’t install Windows 7 apps on Courier, the source said, and that’s intentional.

The original Microsoft Tablets “failed because the applications were not tailored to a tablet form factor - that is, Word still had toolbars and menus and scollbars. So, a tablet needs to be like an iPhone - a UX that is specific for the form factor,” the source said.

My source said that Courier is an incubation project, meaning it’s further along than a Microsoft Research project, but still not in the commercialization pipeline. That said, he heard the  delivery goal is mid-2010. That seems pretty darn ambitious to me, but he also said Microsoft is currently leaning toward using the Xbox model — in other words, making the device itself, and not relying on its current Tablet partners — so that could speed things up a bit.

I can’t verify any of what my source has told me. But I figured I’d put it out there, as it jibes with what Gizmodo has unearthed.

What’s your take? Is the Courier protoype we’re hearing and seeing bits and pieces about something you could see having wider appeal than the current generation of Tablets?

September 28th, 2009

Helios: Another Microsoft operating system project to watch

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:58 am

Categories: Code names, Corporate strategy, Multicore/distributed computing, Research, Windows client, Windows server

Tags: Helios D.d., Operating System, Microsoft Corp., Singularity, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s researchers are working on yet another operating-system research project which can trace its roots to the company’s Singularity project. This new operating system, known as Helios, is a heterogeneous multiprocessing platform built around satellite kernels.

(The folks over at the Ma-Config.com blog sent me a pointer to Helios after I wrote last week about another Microsoft Research operating system project, codenamed “Barrelfish.” Without the link they provided, I wouldn’t have found information about Helios, as it isn’t listed on the active projects page for Microsoft Research. Microsoft researchers have written a 14-page paper on Helios, however, which is slated for publication in October.)

Singularity, in case you need a quick refresher, is a microkernel operating system and set of related tools and libraries that is developed completely in managed code. Singularity is not based on Windows; it was written from scratch as a proof-of-concept. Microsoft’s Midori incubation project is another effort which can trace its lineage to Singularity.

What, exactly, is Helios? From the soon-to-be-published ACM paper about it:

“Helios is an operating system designed to simplify the task of writing, deploying, and tuning applications for heterogeneous platforms. Helios introduces satellite kernels, which export a single, uniform set of OS abstractions across CPUs of disparate architectures and performance characteristics. Access to I/O services such as file systems are made transparent via remote message passing, which extends a standard microkernel message-passing abstraction to a satellite kernel infrastructure. Helios retargets applications to available ISAs by compiling from an intermediate language.”

According to the paper, the team built Helios by modifying the Singularity research development kit (RDK) to support satellite kernels, remote message passing and affinity. They implemented satellite-kernel support on two different hardware platforms: an Intel XScale programmable PCI Express I/O card and cache-coherent NUMA architectures. Helios “treats programmable devices as part of a ‘distributed system in the small,’” according to Microsoft’s description, and “is inspired by distributed operating systems such as LOCUS, Emerald and Quicksilver.”

The Helios researchers describe Helios and Barrelfish, another Microsoft Research OS project, as complementary. From the paper:

“Barrelfish focuses on gaining a fine-grained understanding of application requirements when running applications, while the focus of Helios is to export a single-kernel image across heterogenous coprocessors to make it easy for applications to take advantage of new hardware
platforms.”

While there has been lots of talk about what Microsoft is planning to deliver as the successor to Windows, it’s worth remembering that Singularity, Barrelfish, Helios and Midori are all in early stages — and might not ever be commercialized. While Microsoft officials don’t mind talking about the office of 2019, they don’t want to share anything at all on the version of Windows expected in 2011/2012, let alone anything beyond that. So it’s tough to say how/if any of these future OS projects will influence the next big OS thing at Microsoft. Still, they’re all definitely worth watching….

September 25th, 2009

Microsoft and European researchers deliver a snapshot of multikernel 'Barrelfish' OS

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:14 am

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Google, Multicore/distributed computing, Research, Utility/cloud computing, Windows CE

Tags: Operating System, Microsoft Corp., Barrelfish, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft and European researchers have released a “snapshot” of Barrelfish, which is a “multikernel” distributed operating system project in which Microsoft’s Cambridge (UK) Research Lab has a big part.

Barrelfish isn’t a new project; Microsoft Research and ETH Zurich, a university focused on science and technology, have been working on it since at least 2007. But on September 14, the team released an early version of the operating system for those interested in testing it.

(The licensing/copyright terms for Barrelfish are here, along with a note that the Os includes “some third-party libraries, which are covered by various BSD-like open source licenses.”) The team also noted that “a more complete (and usable) release” of Barrelfish will be coming “soon.”

According to the Microsoft Research Web site, Barrelfish is one of a number of projects in which Microsoft is involved in the multi/many-core space. Here’s the description of the project:

“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.”

Microsoft and the ETH Zurich researchers have made available several  white papers outlining the goals and design of Barrelfish. None of those papers mention “Midori,” another distributed operating-system project that is in incubation at Microsoft, nor Singularity, another Microsoft Research operating-system project that inspired Midori.

But there still are a few interesting tidbits in the Barrelfish papers. The Barrelfish project may have implications for Microsoft’s Dryad and Google’s MapReduce, two programming initiatives that are key to the two companies’ datacenter/cloud efforts. (Here’s what I’ve written on Microsoft’s Dryad concurrent-computing work, if you want more background.)

From Microsoft’s latest Barrelfish paper:

“Structuring the OS as a distributed system more closely matches the structure of some increasingly popular programming models for datacenter applications, such as MapReduce and Dryad, where applications are written for aggregates of machines.”

And ARM processors are on the list of those slated to supported by Barrelfish. Microsoft’s Windows Embedded CE operating system runs on ARM but no variants of Windows do (at least for now).

Any OS experts out there see anything else of note in the Barrelfish papers? Any thoughts as to how it might fit (or not) with what we’ve heard to date about Microsoft Midori?