Pervasive personal computing in an Internet Suspend/Resume system

The Internet Suspend/Resume model of mobile computing cuts the tight binding between PC state and PC hardware. By layering a virtual machine on distributed storage, ISR lets the VM encapsulate execution and user customization state; distributed storage then transports that state across space and time. This article explores the implications of ISR for an infrastructure-based approach to mobile computing. It reports on experiences with three versions of ISR and describes work in progress toward the OpenISR version.