A Service Execution Mechanism for a Distributed Environment (NOT KNOWN IF PUBLISHED BECAUSE AUTHOR HAS LEFT AT&T)

This research is concerned with understanding the issues and problems of transparently executing computations in a computing engine, a distributed environment of machines loosely coupled with high-speed local area networks. The central idea of our approach is that computations available to the user in a distributed system should be treated as services, where a service is a user-level computation that is offered by one or more machines. Our approach is new because we separate the identification of a service from its execution for all computations available to the user. This abstraction allows the details of performing a service to be hidden from the user, and allows the user to specify what services he would like to use and not be concerned with where or how the services are invoked.