UC Berkeley professor John Kubiatowicz presented a new operating system called Tessellation at the Design Automation Conference in Texas on Wednesday.
Tessellation aims to make computers more responsive and increase the quality of services such as video conferencing and music production. Kubiatowicz and his team began working on Tessellation five years ago, when UC Berkeley received a grant from Microsoft Corporation and Intel Corporation to help develop software.
“Tessellation was an operating system that we developed to try to take advantage of all of these processors that are now on these modern chips,” Kubiatowicz said. “In reinventing operating systems, we decided to focus on things that mattered to people, like responsiveness — so, like, rather than seeing the little bouncing ball or the spinning icon, you always get an immediate response.”
According to Kubiatowicz, the development of Tessellation was challenging due to the absence of any other systems like it. Kubiatowicz came up with the concept of Tessellation when he realized that in order to make a faster operating system, he would need to start from scratch.
Through the operating system’s increase in speed, users will be able to run numerous programs simultaneously without experiencing any of the issues currently present in commonly used operating systems.
“In other words, your stream of the latest ‘Mad Men’ episode shouldn’t skip or stutter because your anti-virus software is scanning your file system,” said Gage Eads, a UC Berkeley graduate student who worked on the project.
The increase in speed has allowed UC Berkeley music professor David Wessel to develop a music program that runs on Tessellation. The new program allows musicians to minimize sound imperfections when recording digital music.
“When you play music on a keyboard, you want the time between making gestures on the interface and when music comes back to be very low,” Wessel said. “Tessellation makes it easy for musicians to build software environments that are reactive and have good behavior in respect to latency and that can do a lot of computations.”
Researchers are currently working to integrate Tessellation with various devices, such as Google Glass and televisions.
“My ultimate goal for the project is to integrate together all these electronic devices along with the Cloud, making it extremely easy for people to access these applications without thinking about it,” Kubiatowicz said.
Although Kubiatowicz will release trial versions of Tessellation for experimentation, the final version of Tessellation will not be available for a few years.
Contact Elise Aliotti at [email protected]