2K: A Component-Based Network-Centric Operating System for the Next Millennium

After thirty years of explosive growth in computing and network technology, significant advances are made in the area of distributed operating systems. Even after all these advances, we have today’s market place littered with devices such as PDAs, mobile phones, laptops, pagers, etc. which are not interconnected. Existing Distributed Operating Systems do solve many problems related to resource management, but they lack in the problem of heterogeneity, and dynamic adaptability, which are essential for dynamic heterogeneous environments. Besides Operating Systems, middleware solution, such as CORBA and Java/Jini, solve part of the heterogeneity problem by providing communication protocol between different platform but fail to address dynamic, distributed resource management and adaptability. The 2K Operating System, lead by group of scientists and graduate students at University of Illinios at Urbana-Champaign, aims to manage changes and seamlessly integrate new and old technologies in our dynamic heterogeneous world. The 2K Operating System is built to provide high degree of mobility, heterogeneity, and interactions among computing devices connected to the global network. The 2K provides both the middleware solution, which runs on top of the existing Operating Systems, and the fullscale operating system equipped with its own Off++ microkernel. The purpose of this paper is to present 2K, an adaptable, distributed, network-centric operating system.