This project deals with the design, implementation and evaluation of a new operating system called Scout, which is designed to meet the requirements of the systems connected to the National Information Infrastructure. The high level goals include, reliable delivery of data to applications at high bandwidths, and scalability with increasing number of processors. Scout is based on abstraction called path which extends the network communication into the host operating system: resource allocation, scheduling and fault-isolation are done on a path basis. Scout will address the issue of scalability by developing operating system specific compiler technology to optimize applications to specific operating systems. Two main deliverables of the project are the Scout operating system itself and the set of tools for the development of new operating systems.