Providing the Web Operating System with an Effective Searchmethod for Sharing Available Resources

The world wide interconnect network (Internet) , with its huge amount of resources, represents a fertile environment for the execution of applications on remotely connected networks. Recently , a Web operating system (WOS) has been proposed and is currently under development (W OS TM). It would allow some or all of the resources at participating sites to be assigned to those applications submitted to the WOS for execution. Due to the dynamic nature of Inter-net resource availability, locating these resources for assignment to submitted applications is an essential requirement of a WOS. Locating available resources requires a highly eeective search strategy that is able to compensate for networks with high probability of failure rates. This paper proposes the integration of Pathhnder into the WOS. Pathhnder is an algorithm who's search provides fault-tolerance by ooering alternative paths at relatively low costs.