Highly Reliable Mobile Desktop Computing in Your Pocket

We present DeskPod, a portable system that provides a highly reliable desktop computing environment for mobile users by leveraging rapid improvements in capacity, cost, and size of portable storage devices. DeskPod enables a user’s live computing environment to be suspended to portable storage, carried around, easily copied for faultresilience, and resumed from the storage device to provide the user with the same persistent, personalized computing environment on another computer. DeskPod achieves this by providing a virtualization and checkpoint/restart mechanism that decouples a desktop computing environment from any single hardware device so that it can be stored and executed anywhere, improving desktop computing reliability by eliminating a potential single point of failure. We have implemented a Linux DeskPod prototype and demonstrate its ability to quickly suspend and resume desktop sessions, enabling a seamless mobile experience.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: COMPSAC
• Authors: Shaya Potter, Jason Nieh
• Keywords: COMPSAC 2006, Computing Environment, Desktop Computing Environment, Portable Storage, Software Engineering