ITR: Collaborative Research: Digital Resource Profiling for Wide Area Applications

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal will explore fundamental research issues that impact performance and scalability of Wide Area Applications. The proposed research undertakes a comprehensive study of the access latencies and changing behavior of digital resources over time and across different applications, when accessed via the dynamic WAN. One objective of this research is to develop appropriate latency profiles and resource profiles to characterize this behavior. Latency profiles will be developed to reflect the end-to-end delay experienced by a cluster of clients and resources (servers). Resource profiles reflect appropriate metrics, such as existence checking, testing reachability over time, and learning patterns of updates. These profiles will be used to customize service and information delivery to clients, considering both application requirements and the noisy WAN environment. The corresponding algorithms will explore the trade-offs between end-to-end latency and data obsolescence for different application requirements. Research results will aim to establish a consistent framework for profiling and to answer the following question: to what extent can profiling be used in improving clients' availability to resources. Formal results developed in the theoretical study will be evaluated on large scale applications. Collaboration with Corporation for National Research Initiative (CNRI) Handle protocol developers will provide a test-bed for large scale