The Use of Services in the TILDE Environment*

As computing environments grow from a. single machine to a distributed environment of machines connected by networks, the capability to access remote resources in a transpaf'ent manner is desirable. Transparency mea.ns that how the resource is accessed and where it is located does not need to be known by the user of the resource. This work looks at transparently extending command execution from a single machine to a multi-machine computing engine. Rather than continue to treat commands as executa.ble files, as done by many distributed systems) we investigate a new approach that treats all commands as services. Our approach separates the identifica-tion of a service from the performance of a service. This abstraction allows details of service invocation to be hidden from the user, and allows the same service to be given the same name regardless of how it is provided or what is the processor type of the machine providing the service. In this pa.per we model the essential components of conunand execution, and detail our experience with the approach to treat commands as services in a distributed environment