Transparent Computing: Spatio-Temporal Extension on von Neumann Architecture for Cloud Services

The rapid advancements in hardware, software, and computer networks have facilitated the shift of the computing paradigm from mainframe to cloud computing, in which users can get their desired services anytime, anywhere, and by any means. However, cloud computing also presents many challenges, one of which is the difficulty in allowing users to freely obtain desired services, such as heterogeneous OSes and applications, via different light-weight devices. We have proposed a new paradigm by spatio-temporally extending the von Neumann architecture, called transparent computing, to centrally store and manage the commodity programs including OS codes, while streaming them to be run in non-state clients. This leads to a service-centric computing environment, in which users can select the desired services on demand, without concern for these services’ administration, such as their installation, maintenance, management, and upgrade. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept, namely Meta OS, to support such program streaming through a distributed 4VP⁺ platform. Based on this platform, a pilot system has been implemented, which supports Windows and Linux environments. We verify the effectiveness of the platform through both real deployments and testbed experiments. The evaluation results suggest that the 4VP⁺ platform is a feasible and promising solution for the future computing infrastructure for cloud services.