The proposed project will provide studentswith "hands-on" experience with distributed operating systems in a realistic environment. The students in the Operating Systems and related courses will be able to experiment with the hardware and software aspects of a distributed operating system. This will lead to a better understanding of the basic concepts e.g. fault tolerance, load balancing, incremental growth, computational speedup and transparency which are not available in a traditional centralized operating system environment. To this end, it is planned to use Minix 1.5 (a UNIX look alike), an open, unprotected operating system with a networking kernel. The requested equipment comprises ten 486DX workstations connected via ethernet, each running the Minix 1.5 networking kernel. The machines in the existing operating systems laboratory (obtained through NSF/ILI grant USE: 8851239, with PC/XTs) will also be connected via ethernet to the new machines.
