The goal of this research is to remove the tight binding of user state to specific computing hardware. This tight binding arose at the birth of personal computing nearly three decades ago, and has continued unchanged since that time. It has many negative consequences: hardware upgrades are painful, disaster recovery is complex, and total cost of ownership is high. It also forces mobile computing into a paradigm of each user carrying personal hardware, rather than traveling hands-free and taking advantage of pervasive hardware.
The proposed research aims for a new vision of on-demand personal computing called "Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR)" that exploits the ubiquitous presence of the Internet. This research explores issues at the intersection of two well-established technologies: virtual machine (VM) technology and distributed file system technology. By layering a VM on a distributed file system that performs aggressive client caching, a user's entire personal computing environment (operating system, applications and user files) can be accurately and safely delivered anywhere on the Internet.
The proposed research spans operating systems, distributed systems, mobile and pervasive computing, and security and privacy. Its has three major thrusts: (a) Coping with Huge VM State, (b) Preserving Privacy of VM State, and (c) Dynamically Varying Client Thickness. The work in each thrust includes conceptual development of novel techniques and algorithms, as well as their implementation and experimental validation in the context of a prototype. This prototype will be disseminated in open source form, for use by other researchers and by industry.
