About Ensemble

Ensemble is the brainchild of founding developer Scott Balmos, who became interested in a CLR/.Net-based operating system after heavily researching the JNode Project while in college. During the final semester of his senior year, Scott wrote a design outline paper detailing a possible design for an operating system - the ideas of which form the basis of Ensemble's design goals. Ensemble's design has since been slightly modified, after Scott had previously been a member of the SharpOS and Cosmos projects.

Unlike the Microsoft Research Singularity project, Ensemble is intended to be a fully general purpose operating system, using no syntax extensions that would make it uncompilable by a standard C# compiler. It will include a new, non-hierarchical object filesystem based off of the Sun ZFS filesystem. Further, through the use of transparent interprocess communication, the system will be inherently distributable across a number of different physical machines, in the same way that Bell Labs' Plan9 operating system is written. A widget-based GUI and remote display system will be built, allowing for quick remote display abilities compared to the pixel-based protocols of X Window and VNC, and comparable in performance to Microsoft RDP and Citrix. This remoting system will also allow a user to disconnect from one session running on a server, and pick up that session immediately elsewhere on the Internet, even when connected to a different local server "hub".

Overall, Ensemble intends to be part of a new generation of operating systems. From an end user and normal developer perspective, it is designed to be inherently safe, platform-independent, and inherently collaborative, allowing multiple users to work on the same session at the same time.