about XtreemOS

XtreemOS is a Linux kernel-based operating system, supporting Virtual Organizations over Grid Computing platforms.

The development of XtreemOS was funded as an Integrated Project by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) sponsorship program. The project started in June 2006 to last for 48 months, but as of beginning 2010, it was extended to last until September 2010. The project was led by INRIA and involved 19 research and industrial partners from Europe and China.

The XtreemOS Operating System aimed at integrating as a single computing platform many different kinds of devices, from mobile ones to large clusters. Three different versions of the Operating System (called XtreemOS "flavours") target 1) conventional computing resources, 2) Single-System-Image clusters and 3) Linux-powered mobile devices. The overall software architecture of the computing platform was structured, stacking two main software layers. One (XtreemOS-F) supports the platform locally, and is specific of the device, and a second one (XtreemOS-G) takes care of the network level and integrates different devices into a single computing platform.

XtreemOS tackled the challenge to develop the first planetary-scale, reliable and open source computing platform, exploiting a secure and scalable support for Virtual Organizations to allow resource federation.

The goal of the project, besides developing the platform, was also to foster a community of developers, that exploited the XtreemOS extensions to Linux and maintain them. This motivated many of the project design choices, aimed at easing the interaction with the open-source community and at adopting its best practices.

The main challenge for XtreemOS was to provide comparable ease of use, ease of administration, and reliability as an ordinary Operating System, while exploiting an heterogeneous and ubiquitous platform with high performance and scalability. XtreemOS was addressing the need to develop an open-source reference computing platform for the Future Internet (mainly Iaas).