Parallel and distributed processing are no longer the exclusive realm of
supercomputers.  The growing prevalence of systems with multiple processing 
units brings parallel hardware to commodity computers.
Parallel hardware cannot be fully utilized unless running parallel software,
which in turn depends on the operating system's ability to support various,
often conflicting scheduling requirements.
This proposal describes research toward achieving a fully flexible autonomous
operating system (OS), that seamlessly supports the entire range of current
and future applications: serial, multimedia, interactive, distributed, and parallel.