Alpha: a new generation real-time decentralized operating system

Alpha is a new kind of operating system, which is unique in two highly significant ways. First, it is decentralized, providing reliable resource management transparently across physically dispersed nodes, so that distributed applications programming can be done largely as though it were centralized. And second, it provides comprehensive, high technology support for real-time system integration and operation, such as C² and supervisory-level industrial automation, which consist predominately of aperiodic activities having critical time constraints such as deadlines. Alpha is extremely adaptable so that it can be easily optimized for a wide range of problem-specific functionality, performance, and cost. Alpha is the first systems effort of the Archons Project, and a prototype was created at Carnegie-Mellon University directly on Sun workstation hardware modified to the multiprocessors. It has been successfully demonstrated with a real-time C² application written by General Dynamics Corp