Object management in local distributed systems

Abstract

Resource management is a central issue in operating systems design; it is even more critical in distributed systems because of the physical distribution of the resources and thus the natural redundancy and the possibility of partial failures. In this paper, we study resource management and sharing problems in distributed systems. We survey the existing distributed systems and present a taxonomy of resource management. We then propose a new approach to resource management, which we call global object management. A logically centralized systemwide manager acts as a coordinator between different parts of the system and is responsible for managing the toplevel, sharable resources in the distributed environment and making them available to the users. We argue that this approach greatly enhances system resource sharing by combining the semantic simplicity of centralized management with the reliability and availability of distributed management, and offers a number of advantages over the existing techniques.