Collaborating with executable content across space and time

Abstract

Executable content is of growing importance in many domains. How does one share and archive such content at Internet-scale for spatial and temporal collaboration? Spatial collaboration refers to the classic concept of user collaboration: two or more users who are at different Internet locations performing a task using shared context. Temporal collaboration refers to the archiving of context by one user and use of that context by another user, possibly many years or decades later. The term "shared context" has typically meant shared documents or a shared workspace such as a whiteboard. However, executable content forces us to think differently. Just specifying a standardized data format is not sufficient; one has to accurately reproduce computation. We observe that the precise encapsulation of computing state provided by a virtual machine (VM) may help us solve this problem. We can cope with large VM size through a streaming mechanism that demand fetches memory and disk state during execution. Based on our positive initial experience with VMs for archiving execution state, we propose the creation of Olive, an Internet ecosystem of curated VM image collections.

vTube

“…This includes apps, games, interactive media, simulation models, tutoring systems, expert systems, data visualization tools, and so on. While short-to medium-term persistence of these digital artifacts has been addressed, long-term preservation -measured in decades or centuries -is an open problem that few have considered [35]. How can such artifacts be preserved over decades and reproduced in the form originally intended as file formats, applications, and operating systems come and go?…”

“…Besides actual analysis procedures, our work also differs from such work in the scope of application, considering the notion of VM execution together with prefetching. vTube's browsing model was inspired by the Olive project's vision of archiving executable content [35].…”

“…Since their introduction [34], virtual appliances (VAs) have been proposed for many use cases such as software deployment and maintenance [32], desktop administration [10], and management of heterogenous systems [19]. More recently, VAs have been proposed for archiving executable content such as scientific simulation models, interactive games, and expert systems for industrial troubleshooting [35]. Our vision is to create a YouTube-like cloud service for VAs, called vTube.…”