A service execution mechanism for a distributed environment

A service execution mechanism is designed to provide users transparent access to computational services in a distributed environment. The central idea in this approach is that computations available to the user in a distributed system should be treated as services, where a service is a user-level computation that is offered by one or more machines. The identification of a service is separate from its execution for all computations available to the user. This abstraction allows the details of performing a service to be hidden from the user, and allows the user to specify what services he/she would like to use and not be concerned with where or how the services are invoked. The author's experience with a prototype implementation is reviewed. It is concluded that the service mechanism is a small cost in the total time to execute a simple local service, and an insignificant cost for more computation-intensive services. For services that are invoked remotely, additional costs may be incurred for probing during selection, but these costs are negligible in comparison to the costs of invocation.<>