Grapevine is a multicomputer system on the Xerox research internet. It provides facilities for the delivery of digital messages such as computer mail; for naming people, machines, and services; for authenticating people and machines; and for locating services on the internet. This paper has two goals: to describe the system itself and to serve as a case study of a real application of distributed computing. Part I describes the set of services provided by Grapevine and how its data and function are divided among computers on the internet. Part II presents in more detail selected aspects of Grapevine that illustrate novel facilities or implementation techniques, or that provide insight into the structure of a distributed system. Part III summarizes the current state of the system and the lesson learned from it so far.

This paper describes the design philosophy of HYDRA -the kernel of an operating system for C.mmp, the Carnegie-Mellon Multi-Mini-Processor. This philosophy is realized through the introduction of a generalized notion of 'resource', both physical and virtual, called an 'object'. Mechanisms are presented for dealing with objects, including the creation of new types, specification of new operations applicable to a given type, sharing, and protection of any reference to a given object against improper application of any of the operations defined with respect to that type of object. The mechanisms provide a coherent basis for extension of the system in two directions: the introduction of new facilities, and the creation of highly secure systems.

The extent to which resource allocation policies are entrusted to user-level software determines in large part the degree of flexibility present in an operating system. In Hydra the determination to separate mechanism and policy is established as a basic design principle and is implemented by the construction of a kernel composed (almost) entirely of mechanisms. This paper presents three such mechanisms (scheduling, paging, protection) and examines how external policies which manipulate them may be constructed. |t is shown that the policy decisions which remain embedded in the kernel exist for the sole purpose of arbitrating conflicting requests for physical resources, and then only to the extent of guaranteeing fairness.

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This paper describes the implementation of a purely functional programming language for building software systems. In this language, external tools like compilers and linkers are invoked by function calls. Because some function calls are extremely expensive, it is obviously important to reuse the results of previous function calls whenever possible. Caching a function call requires the language interpreter to record all values on which the function call depends. For optimal caching, it is important to record precise dependencies that are both dynamic and fine-grained. The paper sketches how we compute such dependencies, describes the implementation of an efficient function cache, and evaluates our implementation's performance.Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. PLDI 2000, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.