On the adequate support of communication interfaces in distributed systems -- On the duality of fault tolerant system structures -- Process management in a distributed operating system -- Experiences with the development of a portable Network Operating System -- Accommodating heterogeneity -- Design principles of operating systems for large scale multicomputers -- The distributed system POOL -- A distributed process execution and communication environment for high-performance application systems -- Distributed system construction: Experience with the conic toolkit -- Which kinds of OS mechanisms should be provided for database management? -- Specification and implementation of a standard for remote database access -- Observations on building distributed languages and systems.

This volume contains the proceedings of an international workshop on "Experiences with Distributed Systems" held September 28-30, 1987, at the University of Kaiserslautern. The workshop was jointly sponsored and organized by the Sonderforschungsbereich 124 "VSLI-Entwurfsmethoden und Parallelität" and the European Network Center (ENC) of the IBM Corporation, Heidelberg. The objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers who had gathered substantial experience with the implementation of distributed systems. The emphasis was put on the exchange of (good and bad) experiences with existing concepts in distributed system design rather than presenting new ideas. Participation in the workshop was by invitation only. The presentations can be roughly categorized as reports on a specific project or reports on experiences with a certain topic accumulated through several projects. Other lectures treated general topics such as fault tolerance, design principles for distributed languages and systems, and distributed databases.