“Within the next few years, billions of devices — from car
radios to cellular telephones — are expected to be able to access
the Internet. That reality, however, is already dawning at the
University of California at Berkeley. In an effort called the Ninja
Project, a group of graduate students and professors at the
university are working to construct a scalable architecture for
online services and applications that can run on next-generation
Internet devices.”
“The fault-tolerant Ninja architecture relies on a cluster
of more than 100 workstations, all running the Linux operating
system on Intel Pentium III components. The platform is being
designed to support thousands of concurrent users of various
Web-enabled devices, including workstations, cell phones, pagers
and personal digital assistants (PDAs).”
“Applications are implemented in Java. Services envisioned for
the Ninja platform include an online stock-trading system and a
messaging system that integrates voice and e-mail integration,
which could run on a mobile device that combines PDA and cellular
phone capabilities.”