The Internet Suspend/Resume® (ISR) project
  Liberating personal computing from hardware


The Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) model of mobile computing cuts the tight binding between PC state and PC hardware. By layering a virtual machine on distributed storage, the ISR system lets the VM encapsulate execution and user customization state; distributed storage then transports that state across space and time. The OpenISR® platform is the latest implementation of the ISR system developed at Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to a new, robust client implementation, the OpenISR platform will also make use of Content Addressable Storage (CAS) for distributed storage. Other goals of the system include VMM independence, support for transient thin-client mode, guest-aware migration, and cross-parcel data sharing.

   Recent News

August 26, 2015: A preview of the next-generation OpenISR platform is now available.

An early preview of the next-generation OpenISR platform is now available on GitHub. This new incarnation of Internet Suspend/Resume is based on VMNetX, the client for the Olive Executable Archive. Novel features include:

  • Graphical user interface
  • Trickle reintegration of modified disk and memory state
  • Native support for QEMU/KVM via libvirt
  • Completely HTTP-based network protocol
  • Client-directed parcel creation

February 24, 2011: The 0.10.1 release of the OpenISR platform is now available.

Changes in this release include:

  • Support VirtualBox 4.0.4 and above
  • Support KVM on RHEL 6
  • Allow showing image cache state in dirtometer
  • Various other improvements

Pocket ISR has also been updated to version 0.10.1-1.


For release details and information on older releases, see the CHANGES file.

To contact us about the OpenISR software or other technical matters, email isr@cs.cmu.edu. For collaboration, corporate interest, and all other issues, contact Professor M. Satyanarayanan.

Internet Suspend/Resume and OpenISR are registered trademarks of Carnegie Mellon University.