The landscape of distributed computing systems has changed many times over the previous decades. Modern real-world distributed systems consist of clusters, grids, clouds, desktop grids, and mobile devices. Writing applications for such systems has become increasingly difficult. The aim of the Ibis project is to drastically simplify the programming of such applications. The Ibis philosophy is that real- world distributed applications should be developed and compiled on a local workstation, and simply be launched from there. The Ibis project studies several fundamental problems of distributed computing hand-in-hand with major applications, and integrates the various solutions in one programming system.