The distributed computing environment naming architecture

The OSF Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) constitutes a set of technologies which have been selected through an open acquisition process and integrated into a coherent DCE architecture. The author discusses the architecture of DCE while focusing on the architecture of the name service as one of the key elements. The notion of the cell is introduced and described. The cell is an essential property of the DCE architecture. While providing a means for modelling a distributed system, cells go beyond being a formalism for describing the system. The author elaborates on the role and purpose of the cell, the semantics of the cell namespace, the placement in a large worldwide spanning system, the implications of security in a distributed system, and other related architectural properties of DCE. All this is discussed in conjunction with other architectural approaches of modelling distributed systems.