And then there were five ...

Following my post about the four European middleware platforms, I am told about a fifth, ExtreemOS. "The XtreemOS system will offer an alternative to the Globus toolkit, which is currently the most widespread middleware system." A noble goal!

ExtreemOS will extend Linux with native (kernel-level) support for virtual organizations. I like the concept of building support for grid execution in at the lowest levels, so that every computer, whether desktop or palmtop, is ready to participate in collaborative activities. On the other hand, I am not at all sure what form that support should take--or even if we need more than is already provided in today's kernel. I would think that a working hypothesis should be that we don't need any.

Interestingly, Red Hat announced plans to integrate Condor scheduling capabilities into their Linux distribution. However, their goals are fairly narrow, focused on facilitating the use of remote computers for computation.