Operating System Services For Wide-Area Applications

Amin Vahdat


This talk examines system support issues for wide-area applications given the opportunity posed by remotely programmable resources. Experience with the Network of Workstations project has helped to identify four key requirements as applications migrate from the local area out across the wide area: (i) naming of remote, potentially migrating objects, (ii) coherent access to global data, (iii) safe execution of remote programs, and (iv) secure, authenticated access to global resources. This talk describes the design and implementation of WebOS, a unified set of system services designed to simplify application development and to more efficiently utilize wide-area resources. One lesson from the work is that wide-area applications require many of the same abstractions as local-area or campus-wide computing infrastructures.
For more information, see the WebOS home page.

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