Legion (software)
Encyclopedia
Legion is a computer software
system variously classified as a distributed operating system
, a peer-to-peer
system, metacomputing software, or middleware
. It is an object-based system designed to provide secure, transparent access to large numbers of machines, both to computational power and data.
The project was funded by the National Science Foundation
and other funding agencies, and was mostly developed at the University of Virginia
by a group led by Andrew Grimshaw. The Legion people formed the Avaki Corporation to commercialize the project in 1999, but Avaki eventually abandoned the Legion software base, and finally went bankrupt in 2005, with its IP acquired by Sybase
.
Legion is the successor to Hydra, developed to run on the C.mmp
hardware system developed at Carnegie Mellon University
in the late 1960s.
One of the slogans of the Legion project is "mechanism, not policy!"
Computer software
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....
system variously classified as a distributed operating system
Distributed operating system
A distributed operating system is the logical aggregation of operating system software over a collection of independent, networked, communicating, and spatially disseminated computational nodes. Individual system nodes each hold a discrete software subset of the global aggregate operating system...
, a peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
system, metacomputing software, or middleware
Middleware
Middleware is computer software that connects software components or people and their applications. The software consists of a set of services that allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact...
. It is an object-based system designed to provide secure, transparent access to large numbers of machines, both to computational power and data.
The project was funded by the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
and other funding agencies, and was mostly developed at the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
by a group led by Andrew Grimshaw. The Legion people formed the Avaki Corporation to commercialize the project in 1999, but Avaki eventually abandoned the Legion software base, and finally went bankrupt in 2005, with its IP acquired by Sybase
Sybase
Sybase, an SAP company, is an enterprise software and services company offering software to manage, analyze, and mobilize information, using relational databases, analytics and data warehousing solutions and mobile applications development platforms....
.
Legion is the successor to Hydra, developed to run on the C.mmp
C.mmp
The C.mmp was an early MIMD multiprocessor system developed at Carnegie Mellon University by William Wulf . The notation C.mmp came from the PMS notation of Bell and Newell, where a CPU was designated as C and a variant was noted by the dot notation; mmp stood for Multi-Mini-ProcessorSixteen...
hardware system developed at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
in the late 1960s.
One of the slogans of the Legion project is "mechanism, not policy!"