Coordination Services for Distributed Applications

Kansas State University, Manhattan KS

Investigators

Abstract

To isolate a designer from the complexity of a distributed system, there is a need for appropriate middleware abstractions. It has been recognized that these abstractions must be flexible and customizable to accommodate the wide ranging application requirements. Although many customizable frameworks have been proposed, a general framework that can be used to implement different synchronization-related requirements of a distributed application is lacking. The goal of the proposed project is to design a coordination service that provides a basic infrastructure to implement synchronization. A coordination service will be designed that accepts a synchronization specification from an application and interact with the application entities to allow only those execution sequences permitted by the specification. The used of event-notification technology will be explored to implement the coordination service. New synchronization elements to be added to convert an event-notification service into a coordination service will be identified. The research will focus on developing a scalable, fault-tolerant and customizable coordination service. A critical challenge will be to accommodate synchronization without sacrificing the scalability of the event-notification mechanism. The effectiveness of the coordination service in providing services to other middleware services will be evaluated.