Cover feature - Toward internet distributed computing

Emerging Internet uses-including peer-to-peer and grid computing-provide both a glimpse of and the impetus for evolving the Internet into a distributed computing, platform of unprecedented scale. Taking a longer view, the authors consider what would be needed to make the Internet an application-hosting platform: a networked, distributed counterpart of the hosting environment traditional operating systems provide to applications within a single node. The foundation of their proposed approach is to disaggregate and virtualize individual system resources as services that can be described, discovered, and dynamically configured at runtime to execute an application.