One of the major open systems events at the CeBIT Hannover Fair this year looks set to be the Open Software Foundation’s first large scale demonstration of multi-vendor systems co-operating together in a single distributed environment. With what could turn out to be up to a two year lead over rival consortium Unix International Inc and AT&T’s Unix System Laboratories, the Foundation is hoping that its Distributed Computing Environment will take off in the same way as its OSF/Motif graphical user interface. Early versions of the Environment are now shipping, with full commercial availability promised for the third quarter of the year. At CeBIT, systems from Foundation members Groupe Bull, Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme, DEC, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, each running Distributed Computing Environment, will be connected to data from the New York Stock Exchange. The idea is for the Environment to consolidate the processing power of all the systems on the network, enabling each system to act as either client or server, retrieving and processing stock market information for display in real-time on each workstation. The Distributed Computing Environment has been endorsed by over 70 organisations, including universities, database companies and most hardware manufacturers, as well as users such as Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, the European Commission, Unilever Plc and Barclays Bank Plc. Distributed Computing Environment works by subdividing applications into smaller sections and assigning the sections to the first suitable and available computer on the network. It includes the Network Computing System remote procedure call, naming services, threads, time services and a distributed file system. Distributed Environment technology manager Ram Kumar said the distribution of both computers and data at the demo would show customers the strategic role computing can have in a business.
