The emergence of Grids enables the sharing of a wide range of resources to solve large-scale computational and data intensive problems in science, engineering and commerce.
While much has been done to build Grid middleware on top of existing operating systems, little has been done to extend the underlying operating systems to enablee and facilitate Grid computing, for example by embedding important functionalities directly into the operating system kernel.
The XtreemOS project aims at investigating and proposing new services that should be added to current operating systems to build Grid infrastructure in a simple way. XtreemOS targets the Linux well-accepted open source operating system extending it to Grid with native support for virtual organizations. One of the most important challenges in XtreemOS is the identification of the basic functionalities which are to be embedded in the Linux kernel.

A set of operating system services, extending those found in the standard Linux distribution, will provide Linux users with all the Grid capabilities associated with current Grid middleware, but fully integrated into the OS. The underlying Linux OS will be extended as needed to support virtual organizations spanning across many machines and to supply appropriate interfaces to Grid OS services.

Installed on each participating machine (personal computer, cluster of workstations, mobile devices), the XtreemOS system will provide for the Grid what a traditional Operating System offers for a single computer: abstraction from the hardware and secure resource sharing between different users. It will thus considerably ease the work of users belonging to virtual organizations giving them the illusion of using a traditional computer, and releasing them from dealing with the complex resource management issues of a typical Grid environment.  By integrating Grid capabilities into the Linux kernel, XtreemOS will also provide a more robust, secure and easier-to-manage infrastructure for system administrators. This will be experimentally demonstrated with a set of real applications, provided by well-known industrial partners, that cover a large spectrum of application fields.