TITAN: A Next-Generation Infrastructure for Integrating Computing and Communication

The Computer Science faculty at the University of California at Berkeley is developing as its computing and communication infrastructure a new type of computing system, called Titan. This computing system comprises an integrated ensemble of computing and communication elements, organized to provide the user with a number of services that we think will characterize the practice of computing into the next century. The most important of these are (i) multimedia (especially video) capabilities in delivery vehicles, storage and communication, (ii) huge computing power (especially from clusters of workstations operating as a single parallel computer) and enormous storage space, (iii) innovative parallel languages, debuggers, and libraries, and (iv) high accessibility from mobile as well as fixed locations.

• Progress Report 1995-96
• Progress Report 1994-95
• Project Presentation 1995 NSF IIG PI Meeting, Duke University, June 1995.

Primary Components of the Project

• Core Computing Component
  • NOW forms the architecture and operating systems portion of the core computing component of Titan.
  • Castle forms the parallel programming and compilation portion of the Core.
• Media Component
• Driving Applications
• General CS Research Infrastructure

NOW: Architecture and OS for a Network of Workstations

Areas of Research within the NOW Component

• Active Messages: Fast Communication Primitives (Culler)
• Fast implementations of conventional communication layers. Fast Sockets and MPI. (Culler,Anderson)
• GLUnix: Global management of resources. (Anderson)
• xFS: a distributed file system using striping across workstation disks and co-operative caching in client memories.(Anderson, Patterson)
• Network Virtual Memory.(Patterson,Anderson,Culler)
• The NOW Benchmark Suite(Patterson)

Castle: Core parallel programming and language support