The Xinu laboratory is used for research and instruction in operating
systems and networks. It contains work areas with 20 Intel Pentium PCs.
The Intel Pentium workstations run the Solaris operating system and
provide a conventional computing environment. A SPARC file server
dedicated to the lab provides an additional 2 GB of disk
storage.
There are also 15 "back-end" Intel Pentium PCs in the lab reserved
for running the Xinu operating system. These machines are controlled by
a distributed access/downloader system that allows anyone logged in at
any machine to request back-end resources and download programs into
them for debugging and testing.
Several Intel Pentium Workstations and Sun SPARCstations are dedicated
to the Xinu project providing additional support for experimentation
with heterogeneous machines and disk space for remote file systems and
paging.
All machines in the Xinu lab connect to an Ethernet that is connected
through a gateway to the Internet backbone. Thus, the machines have
connectivity to other universities and research labs throughout the
country.