Berkeley NOW: system design in a Network of Workstations with a real network

			   David E. Culler
		      Computer Science Division
		  University of California, Berkeley

The natural evolution of the "killer micro" combined with the
emergence of the "killer network" is likely to position networks of
workstations (NOWs) as the primary computing infrastructure for
science and engineering.  They will provide a vast pool of
computational and storage resources for demanding applications too
large for the desktop, as well as the vehicle for interactive
computing.  In addition to the migration of parallel computing to a
mainstream infrastructure, this transformation brings the opportunity
to dramatically improve virtual memory and file system performance by
using the aggregate memory of a NOW as a giant cache for disk and by
using collections of workstation disks as a soft RAID.  In this talk
we discuss technical challenges in exploiting these opportunities,
including efficient communication hardware and software, global
coordination of multiple workstation operating systems, scalable
management of metadata, and the tension with commodity system
implementations.  We will present preliminary results from the
Berkeley NOW project.