Singularity

OS and tools for building dependable systems. The Singularity research codebase and design evolved to become the Midori advanced-development OS project. While never reaching commercial release, at one time Midori powered all of Microsoft’s natural language search service for the West Coast and Asia.

“…it is impossible to predict how a singularity will affect objects in its causal future.” – NCSA Cyberia Glossary (opens in new tab)

What’s New?

The Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) 2.0 is available for academic non-commercial use. You can download it from CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting website, here (opens in new tab).

Our article in Operating Systems Review, Singularity: Rethinking the Software Stack, is a concise introduction to the Singularity project.

• Overview

  Singularity was a multi-year research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We built a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extended programming languages, and developed new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior.

  

  Advances in languages, compilers, and tools open the possibility of significantly improving software. For example, Singularity uses type-safe languages and an abstract instruction set to enable what we call Software Isolated Processes (SIPs). SIPs provide the strong isolation guarantees of OS processes (isolated object space, separate GCs, separate runtimes) without the overhead of hardware-enforced protection domains. In the current Singularity prototype SIPs are extremely cheap; they run in ring 0 in the kernel’s address space. Singularity uses these advances to build more reliable systems and applications. For example, because SIPs are so cheap to create and enforce, Singularity runs each program, device driver, or system extension in its own SIP. SIPs are not allowed to share memory or modify their own code. As a result, we can make strong reliability guarantees about the code running in a SIP. We can verify much broader properties about a SIP at compile or install time than can be done for code running in traditional OS processes. Broader application of static verification is critical to predicting system behavior and providing users with strong guarantees about reliability.

• Presentations
  • Singularity: A research OS written in C# (opens in new tab), Channel 9 (opens in new tab) video and blog, Redmond, WA, August 23, 2005.
  • Singularity Revisited (opens in new tab), Channel 9 (opens in new tab) video and blog, Redmond, WA, December 13, 2005.
  • Singularity III: Revenge of the SIP (opens in new tab), Channel 9 (opens in new tab) video and blog, Redmond, WA, September 1, 2006.
  • Singularity IV: Return of the UI (opens in new tab), Channel 9 (opens in new tab) video and blog, Redmond, WA, September 1, 2006.
• Collaborators

  Members

  Mark Aiken
  Paul Barham
  Trishul Chilimbi
  John DeTreville
  Ulfar Erlingsson
  Wolfgang Grieskamp
  Tim Harris

  Orion Hodson
  Rebecca Isaacs
  Mike Jones
  Steven Levi
  Roy Levin
  Nick Murphy

  Jakob Rehof
  Wolfram Schulte
  Dan Simon
  Bjarne Steensgaard
  David Tarditi
  Ted Wobber

  Interns

  2007

  • Ryan Braud (University of Califorina, San Diego
  • Michael Carbin (MIT)
  • Michael Emmi (UCLA)
  • Gabriel Kliot (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology)
  • Ross McIlroy (University of Glasgow)
  • Filip Pizlo (Purdue University)
  • Polyvios Pratikakis (Univ. of Maryland)

  2006

  • Marc Eaddy (Columbia University)
  • Haryadi S. Gunawi (Univ. of Wisconsin – Madison)
  • Hiroo Ishikawa (Waseda University)
  • Virendra J. Marathe (Rochester)
  • Polyvios Pratikakis (University of Maryland)
  • Roussi Roussev (Florida Tech)
  • César Spessot (Universidad Tecnológica Nacional Facultad Córdoba)

  2005

  • Michael Carbin (Stanford)
  • Adam Chlipala (UC Berkeley)
  • Martin Pohlack (TU Dresden)
  • Avi Shinnar (Harvard)
  • Mike Spear (Rochester)
  • Aydan Yumerefendi (Duke)

  2004

  • Jeremy Condit (UC Berkeley)
  • Daniel Frampton (Australian National University)
  • Chip Killian (UC San Diego)
  • Fernando Castor de Lima Filho (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
  • Prince Mahajan (IIT Roorkee)
  • Bill McCloskey (UC Berkeley)
  • Martin Murray
  • Tom Roeder (Cornell)
  • Avi Shinnar (Columbia)
  • Yaron Weinsberg (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)