Project Athena

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The Athena project was a joint project between MIT , Digital Equipment Corporation and IBM from 1983 to 1991 . The aim was to create a campus- wide distributed computer environment for educational purposes. As such, the project is still topical at least at MIT until today (2018).

Project Athena was an important milestone in the early history of distributed computing at a desktop - metaphor . In this project, the X Window System , the Kerberos authentication protocol and the Zephyr notification service were created . Athena also influenced the development of thin computing , LDAP , Active Directory and instant messaging .

historical overview

The original goals of Project Athena were as follows:

  • Development of computer-based learning tools for use in a variety of learning environments
  • Acquisition of a knowledge base for future decisions about the use of computers in training
  • Creation of a computing environment that supports various types of hardware
  • Facilitating the exchange of ideas, programs, data and experiences within MIT

To achieve these goals, the Technical Committee decided to build a distributed computing environment . The students should have access to high-performance graphics workstations which, according to the state of the art at the time, should have a computing power of 1 MIPS , a main memory of 1 megabyte and a screen with 1 megapixel . After they had logged on to any workstation, they should have immediate access to a large number of files and programs via central services. Despite different hardware providers, the user interface should look the same everywhere, and only a small team should be required for the administration of hundreds of workstations. These demands led to the development of “stateless” “ thin client ” workstations.

The project developed numerous techniques that are widely used today, for example the X Window System , the Kerberos authentication protocol , the X Athena Widget Set , the Zephyr Notification Service , one of the first instant messaging services, and the Hesiod directory service . The X Window System started as a joint project of the Athena project and the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT.

After the completion of the Athena project in June 1991, the resulting computer environment was named Athena system and the management was transferred to the MIT Information Systems organization . The Athena system is still widely used in the MIT community, including in the computing pools that are distributed across campus. It is also available for installation on PCs.

A computer environment for training

Athena was developed with the aim of minimizing the amount of work involved in its operation. This was partly achieved through what is known today as the " thin client " architecture and standardized desktop configurations. It also reduces the amount of training required to install, update, and troubleshoot.

While maintaining its original goals, access to the Athena system has been greatly expanded in recent years. While in 1991 access was usually via computer pools in university buildings, access was extended to student dormitories , student associations and independent shared apartments . Some student residences have officially supported Athena clusters .

Athena originally used Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) as the operating system for all hardware platforms. In the mid-1990s, the public computer pools consisted mainly of SPARC hardware from Sun Microsystems with the Solaris operating system and Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations based on the MIPS hardware and the IRIX operating system . The SGI hardware was retired because its production ended in 2006. Linux-Athena was then introduced in version 9 with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system on cheaper x86 or x86-64 hardware. Athena 9 also replaced the internally developed "DASH" menu system and the Motif Window Manager (mwm) with a more modern Gnome desktop. Athena 10, which should appear in 2009, will then only be based on Ubuntu Linux (derived from Debian ). Support for Solaris will probably be discontinued.

Educational software

The original idea in the Athena project was that there would be lecture-specific software that would be developed along with the teaching program. Today, however, computers are mainly used for so-called "horizontal" applications such as e-mail, word processing, communication and graphics.

The main impact the Athena project had on training was the integration of third-party software into the courses. Matlab and Maple are used in a large number of science and engineering events. Professors expect their students to have access to and be able to use these applications to complete their projects and homework; some have rewritten their educational software originally created for the X Window System onto the MATLAB platform.

While there have been some examples of thematic educational software at MIT and elsewhere, it is not widely used and its contribution to improving education is controversial.

Contribution to the development of distributed systems

Athena was not a research project and the development of new models of computer use was not a primary goal of the project, rather the opposite was the case: MIT wanted a high quality computing environment for teaching. Obviously, the only way to achieve this was to build such an environment yourself using available components, adding your own software to these to create the desired distributed system. However, the fact that this was a groundbreaking development in an area of ​​great concern to the entire computer industry worked heavily in MIT's favor by attracting large industrial funding.

Experience has shown that advanced development aimed at solving important problems is more successful than advanced development aimed at disseminating a technique that is still looking for a problem to be solved. Athena is an example of advanced development that should solve a problem as urgent as it is important. The need to solve a real problem encouraged Athena to focus on and solve important questions, not being distracted by scientifically interesting but relatively unimportant questions. Therefore, Athena made very significant contributions to the technology of distributed computing and also solved a training problem.

The innovations in system architecture and design principles that go back to Athena are, in today's terminology, among others:

Many design concepts that were developed for the OLH now appear in popular help desk software packages.

Because the functional and system management benefits that the Athena System provided were not available in any other system of the time, its use spread beyond the MIT campus. In line with MIT's strategy, the software has been made available to all interested parties free of charge. DEC made a real product out of it and offered it to the market along with support services. A number of (probably 40-60) academic and industrial organizations installed the Athena software.

The architecture of the system was also used outside of MIT. In particular, the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) was based on concepts originally presented by Athena. Later, Microsoft's Windows NT operating system adopted the Kerberos protocol and other basic architectural design decisions that were first implemented in Athena.

Users outside of MIT

The computer graphics and animation company Pixar Animation Studios used most of the first 50 Athena systems to render the film The Adventures of André and Wally B. before the computers were put into general use.

The Iowa State University operates an implementation of the Athena system called Project Vincent , named after John Vincent Atanasoff , the designer of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer .

The North Carolina State University runs a version of the Athena system called Eos / Unity

The Carnegie Mellon University operates a similar system Project Andrew from which the AFS emerged that the Athena system as a file system is used.

The University of Maryland College Park operates a variant of the Athena system, originally called Project Glue and now TerpConnect .

literature

  • Treese, G. Winfield: Berkeley UNIX on 1000 Workstations: Athena Changes to 4.3 BSD . USENIX Association, February 1988 ( stuff.mit.edu ).
  • Arfman, JM; Roden, Peter: Project Athena: Supporting distributed computing at MIT . In: IBM Systems Journal . tape 31 , no. 3 , 1992 ( research.ibm.com ( Memento of June 24, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) [PDF]).
  • Champine, George: MIT Project Athena: A Model for Distributed Campus Computing . Digital Press, 1991, ISBN 1-55558-072-6 .
  • Avril, CR; Orcutt, Ron L .: Athena: MIT's Once and Future Distributed Computing Project . In: Information Technology Quarterly . (Fall), 1990.
  • Frederick, Eva Charles Anna: Looking back at Project Athena . Ed .: MIT News. November 11, 2018 (English, [1] [accessed February 19, 2020]).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eva Charles Anna Frederick: Looking back at Project Athena , 2018
  2. ↑ ocw.mit.edu ( Memento from September 29, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF).
  3. ↑ web.mit.edu
  4. ^ Athena 10 history , Athena 10 history
  5. ↑ wikis.mit.edu
  6. ↑ wikis.mit.edu
  7. ↑ web.mit.edu

Web links