The Amoeba distributed operating system - A status report

As the price of CPU chips continues to fall rapidly, it will soon be economically feasible to build computer systems containing a large number of processors. The question of how this computing power should be organized, and what kind of operating system is appropriate then arises. Our research during the past decade has focused on these issues and led to the design of a distributed operating system, called Amoeba, that is intended for systems with large numbers of computers. In this paper we describe Amoeba, its philosophy, its design, its applications, and some experience with it.