I have been reading Tanenbaum’s Modern Operating Systems, lately. On design issues in distributed operating systems, he writes,
Probably the single most important issue is how to achieve the single system image. In other words, how do the system designers fool everyone into thinking that the collection of machines is simply an old-fashioned single processor timesharing system? A system that realizes this goal is often said to be transparent.
A system that deliberately misleads its users about what it is doing, eh? I think the term he’s actually looking for is opacity.
Ken Dyck 