Amin Vahdat, Paul Eastham, Chad Yoshokawa, Eshwar Belani, Thomas Anderson, David Culler and Michael Dahlin

EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley
Technical Report No. UCB/CSD-97-938
March 1997

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1997/CSD-97-938.pdf

In this paper, we argue for the power of providing a common set of OS services to wide area applications, including mechanisms for resource discovery, a global namespace, remote process execution, resource management, authentication, and security. On a single machine, application developers can rely on the local operating system to provide these abstractions. In the wide area, however, application developers are forced to build these abstractions themselves or to do without. This ad-hoc approach wastes programmer effort and system resources. To address these problems, WebOS provides basic operating systems services needed to build applications that are geographically distributed, highly available, incrementally scalable, and dynamically reconfiguring. Experience with a number of applications developed under WebOS indicates that it simplifies system development and improves resource utilization. In particular, we use WebOS to implement Rent-A-Server to provide dynamic replication of overloaded services across the wide area in response to client demands.

BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Vahdat:CSD-97-938,
    Author = {Vahdat, Amin and Eastham, Paul and Yoshokawa, Chad and Belani, Eshwar and Anderson, Thomas and Culler, David and Dahlin, Michael},
    Title = {WebOS: Operating System Services for Wide Area Applications},
    Institution = {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year = {1997},
    Month = {Mar},
    URL = {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1997/5621.html},
    Number = {UCB/CSD-97-938},
    Abstract = {In this paper, we argue for the power of providing a common set of OS services to wide area applications, including mechanisms for resource discovery, a global namespace, remote process execution, resource management, authentication, and security. On a single machine, application developers can rely on the local operating system to provide these abstractions. In the wide area, however, application developers are forced to build these abstractions themselves or to do without. This ad-hoc approach wastes programmer effort and system resources. To address these problems, WebOS provides basic operating systems services needed to build applications that are geographically distributed, highly available, incrementally scalable, and dynamically reconfiguring. Experience with a number of applications developed under WebOS indicates that it simplifies system development and improves resource utilization. In particular, we use WebOS to implement Rent-A-Server to provide dynamic replication of overloaded services across the wide area in response to client demands.}
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Vahdat, Amin
%A Eastham, Paul
%A Yoshokawa, Chad
%A Belani, Eshwar
%A Anderson, Thomas
%A Culler, David
%A Dahlin, Michael
%T WebOS: Operating System Services for Wide Area Applications
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 1997
%@ UCB/CSD-97-938
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1997/5621.html
%F Vahdat:CSD-97-938