This project has made a series of original, theoretical, and systematic achievements in network computing paradigms. This project first proposed the concept of transparent computing, which spatio-temporally extended the traditional von Neumann architecture. This project then introduced the theory and method of a super operating system (Meta OS) to realize transparent computing, which can manage and schedule networked resources, including Windows, Linux, and other traditional operating systems. In addition, this project brought forward several logical protocol synthesis theories and methods and designed several underlying transportation and access protocols for transparent computing. This project has a significant impact on both academia and industry. It will help to solve the problems incurred by the current technologies of network security and constrained operating systems. The technologies of transparent computing have been transferred to and adopted by Intel, Tencent, and other companies, showing a wonderful prospect in both academic and industrial areas. Several main contributions of this project are listed as follows.

1. It proposed a spatio-temporally extended von Neumann architecture. The original bus inside a single computer is extended to the network and thus the storage, computation, and management of a computer can be separated and decoupled. The traditional instruction execution model based on “stored program” is replaced by a new streaming-based execution model. In this way, users can be freed from the complexity of the application maintenance and management details. A variety of operating systems and network services can be seamlessly and transparently accessed and shared with small terminals.

2. It introduced the theory and method of a super operating system (Meta OS) and implemented it as a platform running above the motherboard but below traditional operating systems. The Meta OS dynamically manages various types of resources including traditional operating systems in an autonomous domain. The Meta OS opens up the black box between the computer hardware and operating system, which enables a protection program against attacks and vulnerabilities of operating system and its above applications to be designed at this level. This will also help to form an interconnect standard across operating systems and chipsets, enabling operating systems and CPU from different manufacturers to connect with one another seamlessly and transparently through the super operating system and thus achieving cross-platform service sharing.

3. It brought forward several logical protocol synthesis theories and methods that enables protocol designers to prevent and detect logical errors occurred during the protocol development. Two underlying transportation and access protocols are also designed and developed for transparent computing, which guarantee the reliable transportation of programs, data, and interrupt instructions and thus ensure the system reliability.

4. It put forward several methods of system performance optimization, evaluation, and fault-tolerance, improving the efficiency and safety of a transparent computing system and lowering the system cost.