Legion (software)

Legion is a computer software system variously classified as a distributed operating system, a peer-to-peer system, metacomputing software and middleware. It is an object-based system built to give secure, transparent access to large numbers of machines, both to their computational power and to their data. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation and other agencies and was developed mostly at the University of Virginia by a group led by Andrew Grimshaw. In 1999 the Legion people formed Avaki Corporation to commercialize it, but Avaki eventually abandoned the Legion software base and went bankrupt in 2005, with its intellectual property acquired by Sybase. Legion succeeded Hydra, which was built for the C.mmp hardware at Carnegie Mellon University, and one of its slogans was mechanism, not policy.