[geeks] Future OS

[Nathan Raymond]

Does anyone know of any efforts to create a new OS that takes advantage of
the change we'll see in the near future where storage and RAM will blend
into just one pool of fast storage?

Right now operating systems (and a lot of computer architectures/hardware)
have a lot of resources and overhead devoted to shuffling data around from
disk to RAM and back again. Once memristors etc. become prevalent and the
storage, we can drop that distinction. The entire concept of 'booting' and
'launching an app' can be entirely different. We'll have the opportunity to
define some fundamentally new computing paradigms.

The other opportunity is with fast networking to drop the antiquated
concepts of 'workstation' and 'server' and just move to the idea of
connected resources (compute and storage). Connect things, and then run
your apps that can tap those resources as needed. The OS will be the part
that tracks how things are connected (their locality, bandwidth, latency,
speeds) and manages what runs where for which user (who gets what
resources).

Seems to me we need a new OS for both of these things because everything
I'm aware of on the market right now is tied down to old concepts of what
storage is and how resources should be managed. Is there anything out there
that's ready for this future?

- Nate