Docs & Demos

Tapestry: An Operating System for Physically Reconfigurable Matter

This paper introduces Tapestry OS, a seven-layer operating system architecture that defines a stable software boundary between physical element hardware and the collective application software that programs it. Modeled on the separation-of-concerns principles that have governed OS design for fifty years, the architecture is scale-invariant: the same developer-facing API governs collective behavior from centimeter-scale drone swarms available today to nanoscale molecular machines on a fifteen-to-twenty year horizon, while lower layers adapt to the radically different physics of each scale — with no central coordinator required at any layer. The paper additionally identifies nine open research challenges spanning distributed systems theory, control theory, materials science, and synthetic biology, for which the Tapestry platform provides a stable, runnable substrate for independent solution and empirical validation.