Mobile Information Access 
Coda and Odyssey
 
Coda 

Publications  

Coda development 

Source code  

Coda cartoons  

People (present and past)  
 

 Mobility places many demands on a system. Size and weight constraints limit the computing resources on a mobile client.  Network connectivity is highly variable, and sometimes non-existent.  Battery life is a nagging concern.   In spite of these challenges,  mobile users need to access and update information at any time and from any place.    

Coda and Odyssey are experimental systems built by the research group of Professor M. Satyanarayanan in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University to explore these issues.    Both systems embody adaptation at many levels.  Coda implements application-transparent adaptation in the context of  a distributed file system.    Since the Posix interface is preserved, legacy applications can run unmodified on Coda.  In contrast, Odyssey supports a type of adaptation called application-aware adaptation that is better suited to multimedia data such as speech and video.  This overview paper provides more details on these concepts.

Coda and Odyssey are building blocks of  Aura , a new flagship project focusing on distraction-free ubiquitous computing.