Mayflower
Jean Bacon · 1986
The Cambridge Distributed Computing System (CDCS)CDCS (ref 1) is a heavily used heterogeneous research environment based on the Cambridge Ring local area network and employing the "pool of processors" approach to distributed computing.The major research issues of its development were the distribution of operating system functions and their underlying communications support.The typical usage of CDCS is for a user, via a terminal server, to ask the Resource Manager (RM) for a processor from a pool (the processor bank).The user specifies a software system, for example, the Tripos single user operating system, to be loaded into the acquired processor and then runs applications on this single machine.Although the user is free to acquire more than one machine, CDCS provides virtually no support for usersto spread a task across a number of machines.Distribution is therefore at the system rather than application software level and tends to be static.