Design of Distributed Systems Supporting Local Autonomy

[Clark80] David D. Clark and Liba Svobodova, “Design of Distributed Systems Supporting Local Autonomy,” 20th IEEE COMPCON, IEEE, February 1980, 438-444,

Use analogy to real world organizations.

individual nodes cooperate in a standardized manner but maintain a fair degree of autonomy wrt their management and internal organization.

Predicts that this will be the most widely used paradigm for distributed systems.

As opposed to the Athena paper, which says that distribution is about cost, this paper says that distribution is fundamentally about the needs of the problem to which distribution is applied: many applications are naturally distributed.

Also, as opposed to the Athena paper, which is a realized implementation, this paper is a more theoretical paper.

Components: nodes (PCs), servers, communication substrate

Issues considered: efficiency, reliability, transaction integrity, and expandability.

there was a part that seemed anti-RPC, where they argued that the application programmer should know whether functions or data being used are local or remote (however they state that this may be hidden from the end user).