MESS-a distributed operating system for the universe

The authors describe the basic design principles of a distributed operating system, MESS, which is hardware independent in nature. MESS is based on the paradigm of global address space, which replaces all the devices, including those reachable by networks. The system, which runs on an arbitrarily large cluster of virtual machines, will turn this cluster into a single processing server. Flexible process migration, implemented as part of the virtual memory management across the network, will hide completely the distributed nature of the underlying hardware. The global virtual memory will be the primary means of communication. The user will perceive the system as a single-machine multitasking environment.