10-03

The Design of a Billion-User Worldwide Distributed System

With the enormous growth of wide-area networks, especially the Internet, one research focus within the operating systems community has moved to building coherent systems that can connect together a billion users who collectively have a trillion objects. No existing system can handle this. Current wide-area applications are constructed individually and do not have any common framework and do not interwork. Furthermore, each new application developer must begin again from scratch, since pieces of existing systems are rarely reusable.

The Globe system is being designed to address these problems. It consists of an object-based layer of software ("middleware") that can be placed on top of each operating system to provide a common interface for applications to deal with. A key idea used in Globe is the distributed object, in which an object resides in multiple (possibly widely-separated) addresses spaces at the same time. Properties and structure of distributed objects will be discussed, as will object binding and location, a highly complex matter for a system with a trillion (potentially mobile) objects owned by a billion users. In addition, security and some applications will be discussed.