"Grid computing (or the use of a computational grid) is the application of several computers to a single problem at the same time - usually to a scientific or technical problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data." (from WikiPedia). The XtreemOS project aims to develop new services to be added to an existing operating system to build Grid infrastructure in a simple and cost-effective way. The main objectives of the XtreemOS project are:

• To build a reference open source Grid operating system based on Linux for PCs, clusters and mobile devices;
• To provide a simple Grid API compliant with Posix while addin new functionality and supporting Grid-aware applications;
• To identify fundamental functionalities to be embedded in Linux for secure application execution in Grid environments;
• To develop a set of self-healing OS services for secure resource management in very large dynamic Grids;
• To aggregate cluster resources into powerful Grid nodes by integrating single system image mechanisms in Linux;
• To build an XtreemOS flavour for mobile devices enabling ubiquitous access to Grid resources;
• To validate the design and implementation of the XtreemOS Grid operating system with a set of real use cases in scientific and business domains on a large Grid testbed;
• To promote XtreemOS software and create communities of users and developers.

XtreemOS is a Linux-based operating system (a product based on Mandriva GNU/Linux distribution) providing native support for virtual organizations (VOs) in next-generation grids. Unlike the traditional, middleware-based approaches, it is a prominent goal to provide seamless support for VOs, on all software layers involved, ranging from the operating system of a node, via the VO-global services, up to direct application support. Click here for the wiki page and here to download ISO file.