My thanks also go to the members of my major committee, John Hartman and Todd Proebsting for reading previous drafts of this dissertation and providing many valuable comments that improved the presentation and contents of this dissertation. I would like to thank the members of my minor committee, Robert Schowengerdt and Jeffrey Gonzalez for their help during my minor studies in the field of Remote Sensing.

The friendship of Peter Druschel and Larry Brakmo is much appreciated and has led to many interesting and good-spirited discussions relating to this research. I am also grateful to my colleagues Patrick Bridges and Brady Montz for helping considerably with realizing the path-related code optimizations. In particular, Brady implemented the last call optimization and Patrick, with great diligence and ingenuity, convinced gcc to perform path-inlining the way we wanted it. My thanks go to Abhiram Kunesh who adapted the MGR window management system to Scout, to Andy Beavier for turning MGR into the path-cognizant WiMP, and to Dave Larson and Rob Piltz for helping with various aspects of the Scout implementation.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank my wife Ning for her understanding and love during the past few years. Her support and encouragement was in the end what made this dissertation possible. My parents, Marta and Erwin, receive my deepest gratitude and love for their dedication and the many years of support during my undergraduate studies that provided the foundation for this work.

This work is supported in part by DARPA contracts DABT63-91-C-0030, DABT63-95-C0075, and N66001-96-C-8518.