Cronus

Introduction

Cronus is an object-oriented distributed computing environment available from BBN Systems and Technologies. Its major goal is to provide a coherent and integrated environment in which distributed applications can easily be built. Significant Cronus features include:

• a complete environment in which to develop integrated distributed applications;
• delivery of the application development environment in a way that is easy to use and results in reduced development time;
• operation in a heterogeneous environment, including underlying hardware architectures, programming languages and environments, and network technology;
• interoperability and coexistance with existing software, operating systems (such as UNIX, VMS, and Genera), and applications.

Cronus has been designed as a base for the development of large-scale distributed heterogeneous applications. Although internally the system is object-oriented, this aspect of Cronus is largely hidden from application developers. Most of the details of implementing distributed applications are provided by a combination of code automatically generated from an interface specification (including an RPC interface for clients), library routines, and system components. Cronus has been used in a variety of applications, for example the interconnection of Common Lisp-based expert systems with off-the-shelf database systems and FORTRAN simulations.

Cronus Release 3.0 is currently is available for the following:

BBN TC2000	nX
Convex	ConvexOS
DECstation (MIPS RISC) family	Ultrix
DEC VAX	VMS, Ultrix
HP 9000 (PA-RISC) family	HP-UX
NeXT	Mach / NeXTstep
Sun 3, 4	SunOS / Solaris

Prototype ports for other platforms (Alliant, Apollo, Cray, Encore, IBM RS6000, SGI) may also be available on request.

Cronus Group Members

• Richard Schantz
• David Bakken
• Chris Barber
• Natasha Cherniack
• Mike Dean
• Penny Karr
• Sue Pawlowski Sours
• Ward Walker
• John Zinky

Cronus Reports and Documentation

• Object Oriented Distributed Computing With Cronus