Another Look at Replicated Application Sharing

For many years, people have wanted to share single-user applications. The vision has been to replicate instances of a single-user application throughout the network and transmit input events from one instance to the others. While there have been attempts to build such a system, they have not succeeded due to an implicit assumption of application determinism. This assumption is untrue in the face of environmental differences among computers running the applications. After describing one approach to solving this problem, we discuss an alternate approach we are implementing in our Zipper system which addresses several shortcomings in the prior work. We conclude by briefly discussing several of the ongoing research issues with our prototype.