Towards an Internet-Scale Operating System

gschoder writes: "Two Berkeley computer scientists (including David P. Anderson of SETI@home) envision an Internet-scale operating system to harness the processing power, networking efficiency, and storage capacity of everyone's computers. Scientific American has their proposal."

Comments

It's been done, and no one uses it

[Frank Sullivan]

Massively distributed operating systems have been around for years... check out Tannenbaum's work on Amoeba. Does anyone use Amoeba? No.

This is two days in a row now that Slashdot has posted articles on the great new idea of distributed operating systems that CS theorists solved and have largely ignored for the last ten years. Besides Amoeba, there was the Connection Machine, VMS clusters, and others.

The fact is, massive distribution is of VERY limited use, and doesn't require OS-level hooks - Napster and distributed.net are both prime examples of useful massive distribution without involving the OS at all.

Half a picture

[Salamander]

As happens too often, this proposal concentrates entirely too much on distributed computation, and pretty much ignores the problem of distributed storage. They're quite different problems, each requiring its own solution, even though it's intuitively obvious that any true "Internet Scale Operating System" would have to deal with both.

If you're interested in this "other half of the problem" here are some links:

• Farsite (Microsoft; focus on many nodes, not long distances, but still relevant)
• OceanStore (UC Berkeley)
• CFS (MIT)
• Publius (ATT/NYU)
• Intermezzo

There are many more. The bibliographies for the above will mention many earlier systems, while a quick Google search for these project names will show more recent ones.