Resource sharing in a network of personal computers

Abstract : As networks of personal computers are developed to replace centralized time-shared systems, the need for sharing resources will remain, but the solutions developed for time-sharing will no longer be adequate. In particular, the sharing of network resources is complicated by issues of security and autonomy, since a network of personal computers may be composed of nodes that are completely controlled by their owners. To facilitate sharing in this sort of environment, an operating system component called the Butler is proposed. As a host, the Butler is responsible for administering a sharing policy on its local machine. This includes authenticating sharers, granting rights in accordance with a locally established policy, and creating execution environments for guests. As an agent, the Butler negotiates with hosts on remote machines to obtain resources requested by a client, and performs authentication to discourage a remote host from exploiting the client. A number of applications for the Butler are described: these fall into the categories of information exchange, load distribution, and computational parallelism. A prototype Butler has been constructed and used in a real application demonstrating computational parallelism, and the prototype has also demonstrated the deportation of processes.