I've heard of Plan 9, but I honestly have no idea what this is. But it sounds interesting... could you give a briefer to someone that is not familiar with Plan 9?
It's free form clustering software. Standard Plan 9 tends to have a pretty rigid structure for how all the services on the grid are organized. This is an attempt to make things much more free-form, so the system can be set up more easily by home users, and everything is more reliable.
One thing you could explain for the benefit of this thread is what "clustering" software is and what it's used for. Is it the same thing as a "distributed system"?
Well "clustering" is a little loosely used here, ANTS isnt really mathematical cluster computation software at all, but it goes beyond the 'distributed os' of the basic Plan 9 design. It boils down to making multiple machines work together to create a good environment for the user that uses all of the resources of all the connected machines in a way where the user doesn't need to worry about which machine is which.