BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
ID:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR98-343
ENTRY:: December 12, 1998
ORGANIZATION:: Dartmouth College, Computer Science
TITLE:: Snowflake: Spanning administrative domains
TYPE:: Technical Report (paper)
REVISION:: 1
AUTHOR:: Howell, Jon
AUTHOR:: Kotz, David
DATE:: December 1998
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, email <reports@cs.dartmouth.edu>
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, write to
       Technical Report Librarian
       Department of Computer Science
       Dartmouth College
       6211 Sudikoff Laboratory
       Hanover, NH 03755-3510
       USA
RETRIEVAL:: Compressed Postscript at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR98-343.ps.Z
RETRIEVAL:: PDF at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR98-343.pdf
ABSTRACT:: 
Many distributed systems provide a ``single-system image'' to their
users, so the user has the illusion that they are using a single system
when in fact they are using many distributed resources. It is a
powerful abstraction that helps users to manage the complexity of using
distributed resources. The goal of the Snowflake project is to discover
how single-system images can be made to span administrative domains.
Our current prototype organizes resources in namespaces and distributes
them using Java Remote Method Invocation. Challenging issues include
how much flexibility should be built into the namespace interface, and
how transparent the network and persistent storage should be. We
outline future work on making Snowflake administrator-friendly.
END:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR98-343