Framework for Designing, Evaluating, and Deploying Global-scale Adaptive Networked Systems

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

National Science Foundation Distributed Systems Research CISE/CNS ABSTRACT PROPOSAL NO.: 0411307 PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Vahdat, Amin M INSTITUTION: University of California, San Diego PROPOSAL TITLE: Framework for Designing, Evaluating, and Deploying Global-scale Adaptive Networked Systems Today, designing and building networked and distributed systems remains fraught with difficulty. Yet, addressing these challenges is becoming increasingly important as an ever larger fraction of the world's infrastructure comes to rely upon networked systems. Challenges faced by networked systems include failures, lack of fate-sharing among sys-tem components, highly variable communication patterns, race conditions, difficulty in reproducing bugs, asynchrony, security concerns, etc. While the advent of higher-level programming languages such as Java has raised the level of abstraction and eased this burden, most programmers still face the task of reinventing the appropriate techniques for dealing with asynchronous, failure-prone network environments known by a handful of elite programmers. This proposal is exploring the design and implementation of a high-level language and runtime environment for building and operating robust, high-performance, and highly-available global-scale distributed systems. Target applications include Internet-scale routing protocols, planetary-scale network testbeds, and computational Grids. This work aims to holistically support the entire distributed system life-cycle from design to de-ployment and operation. The overall goals of this work are to effect a qualitative shift in: i) the time required to build, debug, and deploy robust distributed systems, ii) the ease and accuracy of translating high-level policy to low-level system specifications and con-figurations, and iii) the ability to compare the utility of competing systems architectures in a fair and consistent manner. Dr. Brett D. Fleisch Program Director, CISE/CNS June 29, 2004 .