Speaker: Frans Kaashoek
Affiliation: MIT/LCS
Date: 11/30/00
Time and Location: 4:15 PM, B17 Upson Hall
Title: HOW TO DESIGN FLEXIBLE SOFTWARE SYSTEMS
          or
          APPLYING THE END-TO-END ARGUMENT
Abstract: 

Many software systems are inflexible, limiting the performance and functionality of applications running on top of them. These inflexible systems offer only large high-level abstractions, making it difficult or impossible to provide different semantics or different
implementations. In several systems we have built at MIT, we have achieved flexibility by adhering to a strong variant of the end-to-end argument (Saltzer et al. 1984). In this talk, I will discuss our interpretation of the end-to-end argument and how we applied it to the
design of a flexible operating system, a secure file system, and a modular router.