Single-System Image: The Solaris Mc Approach

Hardware trends are motivating the development of clustered systems in order to provide scalable and reliable computer systems. In order to make clustered systems generally useful, they must provide a single-system image. The Solaris MC1 research project has built a single-system image cluster operating system based on an object-oriented framework. Solaris MC includes a global file system, global process management, and global network support. The object-oriented framework provides several benefits: it performs remote invocations transparently, it manages distributed object reference counts even across node failures, and it supports replicated high availability objects.