CAREER: Ensuring Sustainable Scalability for Globally-Distributed Systems

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed a growing number of large-scale networked systems. Most of these systems are built following an overlay approach, with each of them regularly and independently probing its environment to guide path selection algorithms, route around faulty links and replicate content for availability. As these systems grow in popularity, such an approach will result in an unsustainable degree of monitoring and restrict the variety, number and span of distributed services. The thesis of this project is that a large fraction of globally-distributed systems can be built to ensure sustainable scalability by strategically reusing the view of the network gathered by long-running, ubiquitous services such as CDNs and P2P systems. This work defines and explores "3R" - a new approach to the design and implementation of distributed systems that focuses on minimizing aggregated control and administrative overhead by strategically reusing environment's views and recycling previously gathered measurements. In particular, we are designing efficient techniques for maintaining, accessing and reusing this information for building next-generation streaming multicast, content distribution and data sharing applications. The work explores the tradeoffs in the recycling/reuse of environmental measurements, and their implication in distributed-system design. Ultimately, it will facilitate deployments of wide-area applications, benefiting society at large. The research agenda is complemented by a thorough education and outreach plan for strengthening experimental systems education and contributing to minority recruitment and retention.