Project Athena
Encyclopedia
Project Athena was a joint project of MIT
, Digital Equipment Corporation
, and IBM
to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991, eight years after it began. , Athena is still in production use at MIT.
Project Athena was important in the early history of desktop and distributed computing. It created the X Window System
, Kerberos, and Zephyr Notification Service
. It influenced the development of thin computing, LDAP, Active Directory
, and instant messaging
.
To implement these overall goals, the Technical Committee decided to build a distributed computing
system. Students would have access to (for the time) high performance graphical workstations, capable of 1 million instructions per second
and having 1 megabyte
of RAM
and a 1 megapixel display. Upon logging into a workstation, they would have immediate access to a universal set of files and programs via central services. The user interface would be consistent despite the use of different hardware vendors for different workstations. A small crew would need to be able to maintain hundreds of workstations, leading to the design of "stateless" or "thin client
" workstations.
The project spawned many technologies that are widely used today, such as the X Window System
and Kerberos. Among the other technologies developed for Project Athena were the Xaw
widget set, Zephyr Notification Service
(which was an early instant messaging
service), and the Hesiod
name and directory service.
The X Window System
originated as a joint project of Project Athena and MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, and was used by Athena.
When Project Athena ended in June 1991, the computing environment was renamed to the Athena system,
and administration was transferred to the MIT Information Systems organization (MIT's IT department). Athena is still used by many in the MIT community through the computer clusters scattered around the campus. It is also now available for installation on personal computers, including laptops.
Athena was designed to minimize the use of labor in its operation, in part through the use of (what is now called ) "thin client
" architecture and standard desktop configurations. This not only reduces labor content in operations but also minimizes the amount of training for deployment, software upgrade, and trouble-shooting. These features continue to be of considerable benefit today.
In keeping with its original intent, access to the Athena system has been greatly enlarged in the last several years. Whereas in 1991 much of the access was in public "clusters" (computer lab
s) in academic buildings, access has been extended to dormitories
, fraternities and sororities
, and independent living groups. All dormitories have officially supported Athena clusters. In addition, most dormitories have "quick login" kiosks, which is a standup workstation with a timer to limit access to ten minutes. The dormitories have "one port per pillow" Internet access.
Originally, the Athena release used Berkeley Software Distribution
(BSD) as the base operating system for all hardware platforms. By the mid 1990s, public clusters consisted of the Solaris operating system
on SPARC
hardware from Sun Microsystems
, and the IRIX
operating system on MIPS
hardware from Silicon Graphics
, Inc. (SGI). SGI hardware was dropped in anticipation of the end of IRIX production in 2006. Linux-Athena was introduced in version 9, with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux
operating system running on cheaper x86 or x86-64
hardware. Athena 9 also replaced the internally-developed "DASH" menu system and Motif Window Manager
(mwm) with a more modern GNOME
desktop. Athena 10 is based on Ubuntu
Linux (derived from Debian
) only. Support for Solaris is expected to be dropped almost entirely.
The original concept of Project Athena was that there would be course-specific software developed to use in conjunction with teaching. Today, computers are most frequently used for "horizontal" applications such as e-mail, word processing, communications, and graphics.
The big impact of Athena on education has been the integration of third party applications into courses. MATLAB
and Maple
(especially the former) are integrated into large numbers of science and engineering classes. Faculty expect that their students have access to and know how to use these applications for projects and homework assignments, and some have used the MATLAB platform to rebuild the courseware that they had originally built using the X Window System
.
More specialized third-party software are used on Athena for more discipline-specific work. Rendering software for architecture and computer graphics classes, molecular modeling software for chemistry, chemical engineering, and material science courses, and professional software used by chemical engineers in industry, are important components of a number of MIT classes in various departments.
Although there have been some examples of subject-specific educational software developed at MIT and elsewhere, their use is far from widespread and their success in improving education is not widely accepted. This result is not only the situation at MIT, but is generally true throughout higher education. Indeed, the debate over the value and proper role of computers in education continues, with little consensus in this area.
Long experience has shown that advanced development directed at solving important problems tends to be much more successful than advanced development promoting technology that must look for a problem to solve. Athena is an excellent example of advanced development undertaken to meet a need that was both immediate and important. The need to solve a "real" problem kept Athena on track to focus on important issues and solve them, and to avoid getting side-tracked into academically interesting but relatively unimportant problems. Consequently, Athena made very significant contributions to the technology of distributed computing, but as a side-effect to solving an educational problem.
The leading edge system architecture and design features pioneered by Athena, using current terminology, include:
Many of the design concepts developed in the "on-line consultant" now appear in popular help desk software packages.
Because the functional and system management benefits provided by the Athena system were not available in any other system, its use extended beyond the MIT campus. In keeping with the established policy of MIT, the software was made available at no cost to all interested parties. Digital Equipment Corp. "productized" the software as DECAthena to make it more portable, and offered it along with support services to the market. A number of academic and industrial organizations installed the Athena software, probably numbering 40-60 in all.
The architecture of the system also found use beyond MIT. The architecture of the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) software from the Open Software Foundation was based on concepts pioneered by Athena. Subsequently, the Windows NT network operating system from Microsoft incorporates Kerberos and several other basic architecture design features first implemented by Athena.
Computer Graphics Project, now owned by Walt Disney Pictures), used most of the first fifty Project Athena systems before they went into general use rendering The Adventures of André and Wally B.
Iowa State runs an implementation of Athena named "Project Vincent", named after John Vincent Atanasoff
, the inventor of the Atanasoff–Berry Computer.
North Carolina State University
also runs a variation of Athena named "Eos/Unity".
Carnegie Mellon University
runs a similar system called Project Andrew
which spawned AFS
, Athena's current filesystem.
University of Maryland College Park also runs a variation of Athena originally named "Project Glue", now renamed '"TerpConnect".
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
, and IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991, eight years after it began. , Athena is still in production use at MIT.
Project Athena was important in the early history of desktop and distributed computing. It created the X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
, Kerberos, and Zephyr Notification Service
Zephyr (protocol)
Created at MIT, as part of Project Athena, Zephyr was designed as an instant messaging protocol and application-suite with a heavy Unix background. Using the "do one thing, do it well" philosophy of Unix, it was made up of several separate programs working together to make a complete messaging...
. It influenced the development of thin computing, LDAP, Active Directory
Active Directory
Active Directory is a directory service created by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It is included in most Windows Server operating systems. Server computers on which Active Directory is running are called domain controllers....
, and instant messaging
Instant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
.
Accidental research
The project originated from a grant application written by Michael Dertouzos at MIT's lab for computer science. In it, he stated that if DEC and IBM would provide $50M of funding, then MIT faculty would make the effort to integrate the thousands of PC's, workstations, and minicomputers associated with the grant into its educational program. Surprisingly, Dertouzos did not consult with the MIT faculty before writing this grant application. When IBM and DEC agreed to the terms, many of the faculty (not only in the Laboratory for Computer Science, but elsewhere in the institute) were surprised to learn that they were part of this project. For his role in procuring such a gigantic grant, Dertouzos eventually was made head of Course 6, the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT.Overall history
The initial goals of Project Athena were:
- To develop computer-based learning tools that are usable in multiple educational environments
- To establish a base of knowledge for future decisions about educational computing
- To create a computational environment supporting multiple hardware types
- To encourage the sharing of ideas, code, data, and experience across MIT
To implement these overall goals, the Technical Committee decided to build a distributed computing
Distributed computing
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
system. Students would have access to (for the time) high performance graphical workstations, capable of 1 million instructions per second
Instructions per second
Instructions per second is a measure of a computer's processor speed. Many reported IPS values have represented "peak" execution rates on artificial instruction sequences with few branches, whereas realistic workloads typically lead to significantly lower IPS values...
and having 1 megabyte
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
of RAM
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
and a 1 megapixel display. Upon logging into a workstation, they would have immediate access to a universal set of files and programs via central services. The user interface would be consistent despite the use of different hardware vendors for different workstations. A small crew would need to be able to maintain hundreds of workstations, leading to the design of "stateless" or "thin client
Thin client
A thin client is a computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other computer to fulfill its traditional computational roles. This stands in contrast to the traditional fat client, a computer designed to take on these roles by itself...
" workstations.
The project spawned many technologies that are widely used today, such as the X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
and Kerberos. Among the other technologies developed for Project Athena were the Xaw
Xaw
Xaw is short for the X Window System Athena widget set, which is a set of widgets to implement simple user interfaces based upon the X Toolkit Intrinsics...
widget set, Zephyr Notification Service
Zephyr (protocol)
Created at MIT, as part of Project Athena, Zephyr was designed as an instant messaging protocol and application-suite with a heavy Unix background. Using the "do one thing, do it well" philosophy of Unix, it was made up of several separate programs working together to make a complete messaging...
(which was an early instant messaging
Instant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
service), and the Hesiod
Hesiod (name service)
In computing, the Hesiod name service originated in Project Athena . It uses DNS functionality to provide access to databases of information that change infrequently...
name and directory service.
The X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
originated as a joint project of Project Athena and MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, and was used by Athena.
When Project Athena ended in June 1991, the computing environment was renamed to the Athena system,
and administration was transferred to the MIT Information Systems organization (MIT's IT department). Athena is still used by many in the MIT community through the computer clusters scattered around the campus. It is also now available for installation on personal computers, including laptops.
Educational computing environment
Athena continues in use today, providing a ubiquitous computing platform for education at MIT; plans are to continue its use indefinitely.Athena was designed to minimize the use of labor in its operation, in part through the use of (what is now called ) "thin client
Thin client
A thin client is a computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other computer to fulfill its traditional computational roles. This stands in contrast to the traditional fat client, a computer designed to take on these roles by itself...
" architecture and standard desktop configurations. This not only reduces labor content in operations but also minimizes the amount of training for deployment, software upgrade, and trouble-shooting. These features continue to be of considerable benefit today.
In keeping with its original intent, access to the Athena system has been greatly enlarged in the last several years. Whereas in 1991 much of the access was in public "clusters" (computer lab
Computer lab
A computer lab, also known as a computer suite or computer cluster is typically a room which contains many networked computers for public use...
s) in academic buildings, access has been extended to dormitories
Dormitory
A dormitory, often shortened to dorm, in the United States is a residence hall consisting of sleeping quarters or entire buildings primarily providing sleeping and residential quarters for large numbers of people, often boarding school, college or university students...
, fraternities and sororities
Fraternities and sororities
Fraternities and sororities are fraternal social organizations for undergraduate students. In Latin, the term refers mainly to such organizations at colleges and universities in the United States, although it is also applied to analogous European groups also known as corporations...
, and independent living groups. All dormitories have officially supported Athena clusters. In addition, most dormitories have "quick login" kiosks, which is a standup workstation with a timer to limit access to ten minutes. The dormitories have "one port per pillow" Internet access.
Originally, the Athena release used Berkeley Software Distribution
Berkeley Software Distribution
Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...
(BSD) as the base operating system for all hardware platforms. By the mid 1990s, public clusters consisted of the Solaris operating system
Solaris Operating System
Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It superseded their earlier SunOS in 1993. Oracle Solaris, as it is now known, has been owned by Oracle Corporation since Oracle's acquisition of Sun in January 2010....
on SPARC
SPARC
SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
hardware from Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
, and the IRIX
IRIX
IRIX is a computer operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to run natively on their 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture workstations and servers. It was based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. IRIX was the first operating system to include the XFS file system.The last major version...
operating system on MIPS
MIPS architecture
MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit, and later versions were 64-bit...
hardware from Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
, Inc. (SGI). SGI hardware was dropped in anticipation of the end of IRIX production in 2006. Linux-Athena was introduced in version 9, with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux-based operating system developed by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z, and desktop versions for x86 and x86-64...
operating system running on cheaper x86 or x86-64
X86-64
x86-64 is an extension of the x86 instruction set. It supports vastly larger virtual and physical address spaces than are possible on x86, thereby allowing programmers to conveniently work with much larger data sets. x86-64 also provides 64-bit general purpose registers and numerous other...
hardware. Athena 9 also replaced the internally-developed "DASH" menu system and Motif Window Manager
Motif Window Manager
In computing, the Motif Window Manager is an X window manager based on the Motif toolkit.MWM is a lightweight and, by today's standards, extremely minimalist window manager. MWM lacks support for desktop icons or virtual desktops. A plain text file is used to generate a root menu that the user can...
(mwm) with a more modern GNOME
GNOME
GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
desktop. Athena 10 is based on Ubuntu
Ubuntu (operating system)
Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
Linux (derived from Debian
Debian
Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...
) only. Support for Solaris is expected to be dropped almost entirely.
Educational software
The big impact of Athena on education has been the integration of third party applications into courses. MATLAB
MATLAB
MATLAB is a numerical computing environment and fourth-generation programming language. Developed by MathWorks, MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages,...
and Maple
Maple (software)
Maple is a general-purpose commercial computer algebra system. It was first developed in 1980 by the Symbolic Computation Group at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada....
(especially the former) are integrated into large numbers of science and engineering classes. Faculty expect that their students have access to and know how to use these applications for projects and homework assignments, and some have used the MATLAB platform to rebuild the courseware that they had originally built using the X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
.
More specialized third-party software are used on Athena for more discipline-specific work. Rendering software for architecture and computer graphics classes, molecular modeling software for chemistry, chemical engineering, and material science courses, and professional software used by chemical engineers in industry, are important components of a number of MIT classes in various departments.
Although there have been some examples of subject-specific educational software developed at MIT and elsewhere, their use is far from widespread and their success in improving education is not widely accepted. This result is not only the situation at MIT, but is generally true throughout higher education. Indeed, the debate over the value and proper role of computers in education continues, with little consensus in this area.
Contributing to the development of distributed systems
Athena was not a research project, and the development of new models of computing was not a primary objective of the project. Indeed quite the opposite was true. MIT wanted a high-quality computing environment for education. The only apparent way to obtain one was to build it internally, using existing components where available, and augmenting those components with software to create the desired distributed system. However, the fact that this was a leading edge development in an area of intense interest to the computing industry worked strongly to the favor of MIT by attracting large amounts of funding from industrial sources.Long experience has shown that advanced development directed at solving important problems tends to be much more successful than advanced development promoting technology that must look for a problem to solve. Athena is an excellent example of advanced development undertaken to meet a need that was both immediate and important. The need to solve a "real" problem kept Athena on track to focus on important issues and solve them, and to avoid getting side-tracked into academically interesting but relatively unimportant problems. Consequently, Athena made very significant contributions to the technology of distributed computing, but as a side-effect to solving an educational problem.
The leading edge system architecture and design features pioneered by Athena, using current terminology, include:
- Client–server model of distributed computing using three-tier architecture
- Thin clientThin clientA thin client is a computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other computer to fulfill its traditional computational roles. This stands in contrast to the traditional fat client, a computer designed to take on these roles by itself...
(stateless) desktops - System-wide security system (Kerberos encrypted authentication and authorization)
- Naming service (Hesiod)
- X Window SystemX Window SystemThe X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
, widely used within the Unix community - X tool kit for easy construction of human interfaces
- Instant messagingInstant messagingInstant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
(ZephyrZephyr (protocol)Created at MIT, as part of Project Athena, Zephyr was designed as an instant messaging protocol and application-suite with a heavy Unix background. Using the "do one thing, do it well" philosophy of Unix, it was made up of several separate programs working together to make a complete messaging...
real time notification service) - System-wide use of a directory system
- Integrated system-wide maintenance system (Moira Service Management System)
- On-Line Help system (OLH)
- Public bulletin board system (Discuss)
Many of the design concepts developed in the "on-line consultant" now appear in popular help desk software packages.
Because the functional and system management benefits provided by the Athena system were not available in any other system, its use extended beyond the MIT campus. In keeping with the established policy of MIT, the software was made available at no cost to all interested parties. Digital Equipment Corp. "productized" the software as DECAthena to make it more portable, and offered it along with support services to the market. A number of academic and industrial organizations installed the Athena software, probably numbering 40-60 in all.
The architecture of the system also found use beyond MIT. The architecture of the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) software from the Open Software Foundation was based on concepts pioneered by Athena. Subsequently, the Windows NT network operating system from Microsoft incorporates Kerberos and several other basic architecture design features first implemented by Athena.
Use outside MIT
Pixar Animation Studios, the computer graphics and animation company (then the LucasfilmLucasfilm
Lucasfilm Limited is an American film production company founded by George Lucas in 1971, based in San Francisco, California. Lucas is the company's current chairman and CEO, and Micheline Chau is the president and COO....
Computer Graphics Project, now owned by Walt Disney Pictures), used most of the first fifty Project Athena systems before they went into general use rendering The Adventures of André and Wally B.
The Adventures of André and Wally B.
The Adventures of André and Wally B. is an animated short made in 1984 by The Graphics Group , which was later spun out as a startup company called Pixar...
Iowa State runs an implementation of Athena named "Project Vincent", named after John Vincent Atanasoff
John Vincent Atanasoff
John Vincent Atanasoff was an American physicist and inventor.The 1973 decision of the patent suit Honeywell v. Sperry Rand named him the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer...
, the inventor of the Atanasoff–Berry Computer.
North Carolina State University
North Carolina State University
North Carolina State University at Raleigh is a public, coeducational, extensive research university located in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Commonly known as NC State, the university is part of the University of North Carolina system and is a land, sea, and space grant institution...
also runs a variation of Athena named "Eos/Unity".
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
runs a similar system called Project Andrew
Andrew Project
The Andrew Project was a distributed computing environment developed at Carnegie Mellon University beginning in 1982. It was an ambitious project for its time and resulted in an unprecedentedly vast and accessible university computing infrastructure....
which spawned AFS
Andrew file system
The Andrew File System is a distributed networked file system which uses a set of trusted servers to present a homogeneous, location-transparent file name space to all the client workstations. It was developed by Carnegie Mellon University as part of the Andrew Project. It is named after Andrew...
, Athena's current filesystem.
University of Maryland College Park also runs a variation of Athena originally named "Project Glue", now renamed '"TerpConnect".