Francisco J. Ballesteros1

Carlos III University of Madrid

nemo@gsyc.escet.urjc.es

- Sergio Arévalo2

Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid

s.arevalo@escet.urjc.es



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The file is a well-understood and very simple abstraction, which has been successfully used in both centralized and distributed systems. However, files are not expressive enough to capture high-level data semantics and relationships, including sharing and data dependencies. How many times has your operating system translated a JPEG figure into postscript, automatically when needed? How do files help applications to deal with heterogeneity? Moreover, optimization opportunities are lost due to the low-level nature ofand; e.g. in NFS data is sent twice through the network when copying a remote file within the same file server. We feel that a better abstraction is needed and propose an alternate abstraction, the ``box'', to solve the problems mentioned above. Boxes, while being as simple as files, are more expressive. We intend to use boxes as a central abstraction for a distributed adaptable operating system we are building.