A Peek Under Microsoft's Secret 'Bigtop'
Anonymous sources close to Microsoft gave a tip to eWeek about a project Microsoft is developing on grid computing code-named Bigtop. Bigtop would allow users "to create a set of loosely coupled, distributed operating-systems components in a relatively rapid way."
According to this eWeek article, Microsoft is looking at the results of coupling a larger number of moderately powerful computers (rather than a smaller number of high-performance computers) together. The first commercial offering of Bigtop will likely be a distributed grid-computer operating system.
Timeline for this effort? Sources said some sort of preview version of the Bigtop code will likely be available to the company's software-development partners by 2006.
For more information, such as the three components of Bigtop, check out the eWeek article.
A Peek Under Microsoft's Secret 'Bigtop' (eWeek, December 29, 2004)