The Amoeba system is a general purpose distributed operating system,
designed to take a collection of machines and make them act together as
a single system. Users are not aware of the number or locations of
processors that run their commands, nor the number and location of the
file servers that store their files. As a matter of fact, an Amoeba
system looks like a single, old-fashioned time-sharing system. It is
the purpose of this study to describe the key features of the Amoeba
like process management and group communication in terms of their
relation to the field of distributed systems and algorithms. We will
also discuss some fault-tolerance in the system as well as some
applications that are well suited to run on this kind of setup.
Finally, we will present the features of Amoeba that constitute its
principle strengths, as well as places where the system is lacking,
followed by some concluding remarks.