Speaker:  Gun Sirer
Affiliation:  University of Washington
Date:  5/4/00
Time:  4:15 PM
Location:  B17 Upson Hall
Host:  Robbert van Renesse
Title:  Distributed Virtual Machines: A New System Architecture for Networked Computers

The rise of the Internet, the explosion in the number of networked hosts, and the accompanying shift from desktop computing on workstations to network computing on ubiquitous devices have outpaced the capabilities of modern operating systems. In particular, even though the Java virtual machine was specifically designed to offer strong security guarantees, to simplify system management, and to support cheap embedded devices, Java installations have had difficulty achieving these goals.

In this talk, I will describe a new system architecture that addresses the manageability, security and scalability requirements of networked computers. This architecture factors operating system services out of clients and locates them on transparent proxies within the networking fabric. I will describe our distributed Java virtual machine implementation based on this architecture, and show that this approach can yield smaller, cheaper clients and more manageable and more secure networks.