Summary: WebOS: Operating System Services for Wide Area Applications \Lambda
Amin Vahdat y Thomas Anderson z Michael Dahlin x Eshwar Belani y David Culler y
Paul Eastham y Chad Yoshikawa y
Abstract
In this paper, we demonstrate the power of providing
a common set of Operating System services to wide­area
applications, including mechanisms for naming, persistent
storage, remote process execution, resource management,
authentication, and security. On a single machine, appli­
cation developers can rely on the local operating system to
provide these abstractions. In the wide area, however, ap­
plication developers are forced to build these abstractions
themselves or to do without. This ad­hoc approach often re­
sults in individual programmers implementing non­optimal
solutions, wasting both programmer effort and system re­
sources. To address these problems, we are building a sys­
tem, WebOS, that provides basic operating systems services
needed to build applications that are geographically dis­
tributed, highly available, incrementally scalable, and dy­
namically reconfigurable. Experience with a number of ap­

Source: Anderson, Tom - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington at Seattle
Dahlin, Michael D. - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin
Newhall, Tia - Computer Science Department, Swarthmore College
Vahdat, Amin - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California at San Diego

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences