Legion is a

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

system variously classified as a

distributed operating system A distributed operating system is system software over a collection of independent software, networked, communicating, and physically separate computational nodes. They handle jobs which are serviced by multiple CPUs. Each individual node holds a ...

, a

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

system,

metacomputing software Middleware in the context of distributed applications is software that provides services beyond those provided by the operating system to enable the various components of a distributed system to communicate and manage data. Middleware supports a ...

, and

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement c ...

. It is an object-based system designed to provide secure, transparent access to large numbers of machines, both to computational power and data. The project was funded by the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

and other funding agencies, and was mostly developed at the

University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with College admission ...

by a group led by

Andrew Grimshaw Andrew is the English form of a given name common in many countries. In the 1990s, it was among the top ten most popular names given to boys in English-speaking countries. "Andrew" is frequently shortened to "Andy" or "Drew". The word is derived ...

. The Legion people formed the Avaki Corporation to commercialize the project in 1999, but Avaki eventually abandoned the Legion software base, and finally went bankrupt in 2005, with its

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

acquired by

Sybase Sybase, Inc. was an enterprise software and services company. The company produced software to manage and analyze information in relational databases, with facilities located in California and Massachusetts. Sybase was acquired by SAP in 2010; ...

. Legion is the successor to Hydra, developed to run on the

C.mmp The C.mmp was an early ''multiple instruction, multiple data'' ( MIMD) multiprocessor system developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) by William Wulf (1971). The notation ''C.mmp'' came from the PMS notation of Gordon Bell and Allen Newell ...

hardware system developed at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

in the late 1960s. One of the slogans of the Legion project is "mechanism, not policy!"

References

Distributed data storage Distributed operating systems University of Virginia Carnegie Mellon University {{network-software-stub