A Peek Under Microsoft's Secret 'Bigtop'

A Peek Under Microsoft’s Secret ‘Bigtop’
Rather than attempting to tightly couple a few high-performance systems together, Microsoft is looking at the consequences of loosely coupling a larger number of moderately powerful computers to achieve a similar result.

Bigtop’s first commercial manifestation will likely be as some kind of large-scale project, most likely a distributed grid-computing operating system, the sources added.

Bigtop is one of Microsoft’s incubation projects. It falls under the domain of Craig Mundie, the Microsoft senior vice president and chief technical officer in charge of advanced strategies and policy, sources said.

Bigtop consists of three components, all written in C#, according developers who said they were briefed by Microsoft. These are:

• Highwire: Highwire is a technology designed to automate the development of highly parallel applications that distribute work over distributed resources, the aforementioned sources said. Highwire is a programming language/model that will aim to make the testing and compiling of such parallel programs much simpler and more reliable.
• Bigparts: Bigparts is code designed to turn inexpensive PC devices into special-purpose servers, according to the sources. Bigparts will enable real-time, device-specific software to be moved off a PC, and instead be managed centrally via some Web-services-like model.
• Bigwin: According to sources close to Microsoft, Bigwin sounds like the ultimate manifestation of Microsoft’s “software as a service” mantra. In a Bigwin world, applications are just collections of OS services that adhere to certain “behavioral contracts.” These OS services can be provided directly by the core OS or even obtained from libraries outside of the core OS.

Well, this sounds awfully familiar to me. I’m awfully surprised to see this in the news.