The Cosm Project

News: The Mithral CS-SDK is now available for starting your own projects.

Publicly re-launched in March 1999, Cosm Phase 1 is a set of open protocols and applications designed to allow computers all over the world to work together on projects. The project may be a mathematical challenge, or rendering an animation, or writing. These have recently been termed distributed computing, or GRID applications. Cosm also involves building the libraries, APIs, and standards that are required to make those types of applications easy to develop for every kind of system.

An introduction, brief history and some Questions & Answers about Cosm should clear up any other details. We also have lists of Cosm news and press.

Jump in progress

Phase 2 is coming, and almost here. CosmFS, the full security system, more utility layer, and a far more advanced client are all on the way. Phase 2 has little similarity to Phase 1 from the user's perspective, so you'll just have to wait for all the surprises.

You won't be seeing any action in the public CVS because it's all so interconnected, that it will not compile and work until the "jump" is done. I'll keep the jump-o-meter updated.

How can you get involved?

There is still lots of work to be done. Coding, documenting, translating, testing, legal work, interface design, database coding, and graphic design. And that is just what needs to be done before Phase 1 is 100% done. You can check the To Do List to see what needs to be done in the near future.

Specific people needed now:
CPU/OS layer porters for MacOS, VMS, and QNX. Also any other platform not yet supported (see CVS). We're also about to need a large amount of work and feedback on the dual licenses and privacy/use policy, so send any lawyers out there our way.

For those that do not have the time to get involved with Cosm development you can join only of the User projects.

You can also grab an Cosm logo and put it on your web page with a link to the Cosm site.

What does Cosm mean for you?

For the User:
Users have something for their computers to do in all their idle cycles, and get access to all the results generated by projects. You also have the opportunity to make your own projects and recruit cycles from others. It's also nice to be able to point at a project and be able to say "I helped with that".

For the Researcher:
Researchers gain access to huge pools of CPU time to run their projects on. Studies can be done in a fraction of the time, theories can be proven or disproved, and since it takes hours instead of weeks, the next big development is that much closer. Cosm and the API will handle all the issues of distributed computing, and the researcher can focus directly on their project.

For the Developer:
Developers can use the Cosm CPU/OS and Utility layer libraries to allow their applications to run on a large number of platforms. These libraries handle all kernel functions as well as things like files, networking, time, compression, and more.

For the Business:
A business gets the same advantages as everyone else, plus some of the tools like the distributed file system are very useful for operations. Businesses can also use the global pool provided they are willing to play well with others and share the results.

Phase 1 Table of Contents