Microsoft officials have said little about the company’s intentions in the grid-computing space. But that doesn’t mean Microsoft is ignoring the evolving arena of grid/distributed computing.
Microsoft is working on a skunk-works project that is code-named Bigtop, which is designed to allow developers to create a set of loosely coupled, distributed operating-systems components in a relatively rapid way, according to sources close to the company, who requested anonymity.
Rather than attempting to tightly couple a few high-performance systems together, Microsoft is looking at the consequences of loosely coupling a larger number of moderately powerful computers to achieve a similar result.
Bigtop’s first commercial manifestation will likely be as some kind of large-scale project, most likely a distributed grid-computing operating system, the sources added.
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Bigtop is one of Microsoft’s incubation projects. It falls under the domain of Craig Mundie, the Microsoft senior vice president and chief technical officer in charge of advanced strategies and policy, sources said.
Bigtop consists of three components, all written in C#, according to developers who said they were briefed by Microsoft. These are:
Sources said Microsoft will likely make some sort of preview version of the Bigtop code available to the company’s software-development partners by 2006. If and when the final version debuts, it won’t be much before the end of the decade, sources added.
It’s not clear whether the Bigtop components will run on top of Windows when they are completed. But sources say that is what they are expecting at this point.
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