IBM has publicly released its open source general purpose FusedOS operating system on Thursday – just days after it released its new cloud operating system.
FusedOS is basically a fusion between a general purpose operating system and a specialized operating system such as IBM Blue Gene/Q. General purpose operating systems are known to support multiple applications while specialized operating system only cater to a specific category of applications. IBM’s FusedOS takes an approach that bridges the “gap between these two extremes.”
IBM notes that it combines these two operating systems such that they run side by side and perform resource partitioning. IBM claims that under the FusedOS, the OS instances run much closer to each other than the OS instances in a virtualized environment such that “process interaction can cross the boundary between them.”
The operating system is a combination of Linux with the IBM’s Compute Node Kernel. “Our prototype runs on the IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer and combines Linux with the IBM compute node kernel (CNK), the production OS on Blue Gene/Q compute nodes”, the FusedOS GitHub page reads.
The operating system can’t be installed in any regular system though as it has been specifically geared to run on supercomputers. IBM has released the prototype under open-source license in a bid to collaborate with third parties on development of the OS. IBM notes, “most parts of FusedOS are available to you under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) while some parts are also available to you under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.”
However those who are looking to dig deeper and learn more about the FusedOS can visit its GitHub page here.
