The architecture of the Eden system

The University of Washington's Eden project is a five-year research effort to design, build and use an “integrated distributed” computing environment. The underlying philosophy of Eden involves a fresh approach to the tension between these two adjectives. In briefest form, Eden attempts to support both good personal computing and good multi-user integration by combining a node machine / local network hardware base with a software environment that encourages a high degree of sharing and cooperation among its users. The hardware architecture of Eden involves an Ethernet local area network interconnecting a number of node machines with bit-map displays, based upon the Intel iAPX 432 processor. The software architecture is object-based, allowing each user access to the information and resources of the entire system through a simple interface. This paper states the philosophy and goals of Eden, describes the programming methodology that we have chosen to support, and discusses the hardware and kernel architecture of the system.