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Design of Distributed Systems Supporting Local Autonomy

David D. Clark, Liba Svobodova, MIT LCS

One-line summary: A particular philosophy of DS architecture based on autonomy, and the functionality each node's OS must provide to be consistent with this philosophy. Lots of vision, no implementation, sparse support.

Overview/Main Points

Implications of this philosophy for various areas of DS performance: 3 requirements for a node's OS:

Relevance

Underlying autonomy principles and "get OS out of the way" are application-level-framing and end-to-end arguments. Clark went on to write about these things later.

Main contribution here is to describe a particular philosophy of distributed-system node design at a time when many others were pushing for tightly-integrated "transparent" distributed systems.

Flaws

No implementation is described, even though the authors admit certain subproblems presented are of daunting complexity.
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