OSL Mission

The OSL mission is to develop science and technology for computing with large-scale and pervasive hardware and software systems, to enable more productive computing and software development, and to foster economic development in the State of Indiana. Work in the Open Systems Laboratory (OSL) is motivated by the changing nature of modern information technology systems.

For pervasive systems to interoperate seamlessly, standardization is needed. All pervasive systems need to talk the same language. Standardization is complicated in today's market-based economy but can arise in several ways: government mandate, industrial monopoly, or open standards, to name a few. As might be expected, the OSL advocates the latter and is working to create open source software tools to bring this about.

Overview

The Open Systems Lab (OSL) is one of the Pervasive Technology Laboratories at Indiana University. We conduct research on science and technology for computing with large-scale and pervasive hardware and software systems.

Current research projects at the OSL are focused in these core areas:

Next generation programming tools & languages. To enable large-scale (millions of lines of code) pervasive software applications to be developed more easily, and to enable them to be reliable, secure, and high-performance, the OSL is developing next-generation programming tools and languages.

Parallel and distributed computing. The OSL is currently spearheading several efforts in high-performance parallel and distributed computing to improve reliability, availability, and scalability of these environments.

Collaborative software engineering. Software development at almost any scale is becoming increasingly collaborative and at the same time increasingly distributed. The OSL has created a development environment (?SourceGrid?) to enable this new kind of software development.

Automatic device configuration. As the number of mobile devices we carry grows, it is desirable (for convenience and for security) for these devices to be able automatically configure themselves based on context and user preferences.

Applications. The OSL is collaborating with several research groups at IU and elsewhere to apply our research results to other scientific projects. Collaborators include the IU BioComplexity Institute, Informatics, SLIS, and UITS.

Contact

For information on economic development, partnerships, tours, and other issues related to Pervasive Technology Labs or its individual laboratories please contact:

Andrew Lumsdaine at lums&64;osl&46;iu&46;edu
Open Systems Laboratory
501 N. Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404
(812) 855-4810