US-Germany Cooperative Research: Using Swarm-Based Abstractions as a Scalability Mechanism in Linda Systems (SwarmLinda)

Florida Institute Of Technology, Melbourne FL

Investigators

Abstract

0337161 Menezes This award supports Ronaldo Menezes and students from the Florida Institute of Technology in a collaboration with Robert Tolksdorf of the Department of Net-Based Information Systems at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. The collaboration will focus on abstractions from the field of swarm-based systems and study their applicability in the context of coordination systems. In particular, the project focuses on the problematic issue of scalability of Linda systems. The results of the project will be twofold: the design of a new Linda based on techniques from Swarm systems (called SwarmLinda), and the evaluation of the scalability of the Linda implementation. The broader impacts of the work will be to make Linda techniques more practical, thereby encouraging wider use, especially in commercial systems. Swarm-based approaches may be able to improve efficiency of communication and coordination with decentralized control. This could lead to enhanced ways to manage large distributed systems, including computers, people, machines, and interacting combinations of them.