Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), VirtualBox, and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.
The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base is a software architecture designed by Microsoft which aimed to provide users of the Windows operating system with better privacy, security, and system integrity. NGSCB was the result of years of research and development within Microsoft to create a secure computing solution that equaled the security of closed platforms such as set-top boxes while simultaneously preserving the backward compatibility, flexibility, and openness of the Windows operating system. Microsoft's primary stated objective with NGSCB was to "protect software from software."
GO Corporation was founded in 1987 to create portable computers, an operating system, and software with a pen-based user interface. It was famous not only for its pioneering work in Pen-based computing but as well as being one of the most well-funded start-up companies of its time.
Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. As of 2020, Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand.
Wind River Systems, also known as Wind River, is an Alameda, California–based company, subsidiary of Aptiv PLC. The company develops embedded system and cloud software consisting of real-time operating systems software, industry-specific software, simulation technology, development tools and middleware.
The Free Haven Project was formed in 1999 by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students with the aim to develop a secure, decentralized system of data storage. The group's work led to a collaboration with the United States Naval Research Laboratory to develop Tor, funded by DARPA.
David Pope Anderson is an American research scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Houston. Anderson leads the SETI@home, BOINC, Bossa and Bolt software projects.
EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.
Charlie Catlett is a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Illinois Discovery Partners Institute and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Dynamics at the University of Chicago. He was previously a Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a Senior Fellow in the Computation Institute, a joint institute of Argonne National Laboratory and The University of Chicago, and a Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy.
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is an Indian autonomous scientific society, operating under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Additionally, it hosts and promotes the collaborative development of open source software projects. It is a major force in promoting diversity and inclusion in both Linux and the wider open source software community.
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop computer is sufficiently powerful to perform billions of operations a second, but for most users only between 10-15% of its capacity is used. Typical uses like basic word processing or web browsing leave the computer mostly idle.
A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software.
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each location being a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically using a "pay-as-you-go" model which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for unaware users.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
The family of Macintosh operating systems developed by Apple Inc. includes the graphical user interface-based operating systems it has designed for use with its Macintosh series of personal computers since 1984, as well as the related system software it once created for compatible third-party systems.
AppScale is a software company offering cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors and third party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, however its source code remains freely available to the open-source community.
