Older Research
The ASA project was concerned with the issues surrounding a global ubiquitous file system and its autonomic management. We believe that a globally available ubiquitous file system would be of great utility to many computer users and organisations, especially ourselves!
Such a file system has to be easily available to all computer users and consequently our prototype presents a WebDav front end which may be used from most common operating systems. To this end with Graham Kirby and Stuart Norcross we investigated the use of various P2P overlay architectures and in particular Chord.
We have our own implementation of Chord called STAChord which makes heavy use of our own RAFDA middleware system. The RAFDA runtime permits users to dynamically expose objects to distribution freeing programmers from the tyranny of early design decisions common in systems like Java RMI and Corba. It also permits the control of various middleware policies including parameter passing, placement and distribution.
With Richard Connor and Duncan Johnston-Watt of Enigmatec Corp I have worked on the problem of distributed mediation. Some notes on this may be found in Mediated Information Flow.pdf. This work has resulted in several patents. The patents describe a distributed, autonomous self configuring architecture capable of load balancing mediated tasks such as stock market order books. This work is ongoing with Cloudsoft.
I was a member of the DIAS project which investgated co-design in the context of sensor networks. My involvment was in the design and implementation of a sensor-net programming language called InSense which is based loosely on the pi-calculus. The current implementation utilises the Contiki operating system. The InSense manual may be found here and the InSense blog here. This work has renewed my interest in operating systems. With Joe Swentek in Glasgow we are looking at a custom operating system to support Insense.
In the past I have worked in operating systems. With John Rosenberg, I developed the Grasshopper operating system and later with David Hulse the Charm exo-kernel system.
I have a long history of working in persistent systems and languages. I was a co-designer of Napier88 and worked with Ron Morrison and Malcolm Atkinson on PS-algol.