Legion: An Operating System for Wide-Area Computing

Abstract

Applications enabled by the increasing availability of high-performance networks require the ability to share resources that are spread over complex, large-scale, heterogeneous, distributed environments spanning multiple administrative domains. We call this the wide-area computing problem. We argue that the right way to solve this problem is to build an operating system for the network that can abstract over a complex set of resources and provide high-level means for sharing and managing them. We describe the design of one such wide-area operating system: Legion. Through discussion of application examples, we demonstrate the attractive features of Legion approach to constructing a wide-area operating system using distributed object components.