Technology

Definition

The World Wide Web's current implementation is designed predominantly for information retrieval and display in a human readable form. Its data formats and protocols are neither intended nor suitable for machine-to-machine interaction without humans in the loop. Emergent Internet uses - including peer- to- peer and grid computing - provide both a glimpse and impetus for evolving the Internet into a distributed computing platform.

What would be needed to make the Internet into a application-hosting platform. This would be a networked, distributed counterpart of the hosting environment that traditional operating system provides to application in a single node. Creating this platform requires additional functional layer to the Internet that can allocate and manage resources necessary for application execution.

Given such a hosting environment, software designers could create network application without having to know at design time the type or the number of nodes the application will execute on. With proper support, the system could allocate and bind software components to the resources they require at runtime, based on resource requirement, availability, connectivity and system state at actual time of execution. In contrast, early bindings tend to result in static allocations that cannot adapt well to resource, load and availability variations, thus the software components tend to be less efficient and have difficulty recovering from failures. The foundation of proposed approach is to disaggregate and virtualize.

System resources as services that can be described, discovered and dynamically configured at runtime to execute a application. Such a system can be built as a combination and extension of Web services, peer-to-peer computing, and grid computing standards and technologies, It thus follows the successful internet model of adding minimal and relatively simple functional layers to meet requirements while atop already available technologies.

But it does not advocate an "Internet OS" approach that would provide some form of uniform or centralized global-resources management. Several theoretical and practical reasons makes such an approach undesirable, including its inability to scale and the need to provide and manage supporting software on every participating platform. Instead, we advocate a mechanism that supports spontaneous, dynamic, and voluntary collaboration among entities with their contributing resources.