Cosmos

Developed by:
University of Lancaster, UK Jean Dollimore, J. R. Nicol, G. S. Blair and W. D. Shepherd

Short Description:
COSMOS is a distributed programming environment that supports structured group working. In COSMOS a Communication Structure (CS) is designed to be a system of rules which characterize the form of communication activity. The main components of the Cosmos s ystem are an object server, a name mapping service and the Cosmos information service. Further there are a structure interpreter and a message delivery service. The message delivery service has two roles, passing incoming messages to local users and sendi ng outgoing messages to local and remote users. The structure interpreter is a component that interprets structure definitions for activities and enables users to perform the appropriate operations in activities. The name mapping service maps text names o nto binary patterns and may be used to build hierarchic naming structures. The object server provides a means of storing and retrieving objects with unique identifiers.

Model: client/server, loosely-coupled
Properties: object-oriented, message passing, UNIX-compatible, atomic transactions
Transparency: access, replication, concurrency, location, failure
Running on: Sun-3
Date: 1987

References:
Jean Dollimore: "The Design of an Object Server as a Storage Module for the Cosmos Messaging System". North-Holland Vienna (Austria), COST 11ter Action, Proc. of the EUTECO'88 Conf., Commission of the European Communities, pp. 171Ð183, April 1988.
J. R. Nicol, G. S. Blair and W. D. Shepherd: "A Tailored Kernel Design for a Distributed Operating System". Lancaster, England, Department of Computing, University of Lancaster, Internal Report CS-DC-3-86, 1985.
J. R. Nicol: "Operating System Design for Distributed Programming Environment". University of Lancaster, Ph. D. Thesis, October 1986.

G. S. Blair, J. R. Nicol and J. Walpole: "An Overview of the Cosmos Distributed Programming Environment Project". Lancaster, England, Department of Computing, University of Lancaster, Internal Report CS-DC-4-87, 1987.