New wine in old skins

Abstract

Since their heyday the 1980s, distributed operating systems---spanning multiple autonomous machines, yet appearing to the user as a single machine---have seen only moderate academic interest. This is a little surprising, since modern data centers might present an appealing environment for their deployment. In this position paper, we discuss what has changed since the community lost interest in them, and why, nonetheless, distributed OSes have yet to be considered for data centers. Finally, we argue that the distributed OS concept is worth a revisit, and outline the benefits to be had from it in the context of the modern data center.