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New wine in old skins: the case for distributed operating systems in the data center

Published: 29 July 2013 Publication History

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.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
APSys '13: Proceedings of the 4th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems
July 2013
131 pages
ISBN:9781450323161
DOI:10.1145/2500727
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Nanyang Technological University
  • SUTD: Singapore University of Technology and Design
  • NUS: NUS

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Published: 29 July 2013

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APSys '13: Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems
July 29 - 30, 2013
Singapore, Singapore

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APSys '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 23 of 73 submissions, 32%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 169 of 430 submissions, 39%

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  • (2019)Ignis: scaling distribution-oblivious systems with light-touch distributionProceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3314221.3314586(1010-1026)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2019
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