Constituting the Need for Flexibility in Distributed Operating Systems

The intrinsic goal of any operating system (OS) is to free the application level from tasks that are either repeating or hard to accomplish. In the 80s and 90s there have been strong efforts to develop distributed OS providing fully location transparency. Although these projects delivered valuable results on certain aspects of distributed computing, satisfactory general purpose distributed resource management at the OS level could not be achieved. We argue that the performance gap between local and remote operation is the major obstacle for truly transparent distributed resource management. This performance gap can only be bridged with significantly increased flexibility at the OS level. At the same time constant overhead must be