ISSG Goals
The charter for the Internet Systems and Storage Group (ISSG) is to investigate
designs for next-generation distributed applications. As the
Internet continues to permeate our daily lives, the way we access the system
will inevitably change. We believe that Internet services (both programs
and data) will continue to become decentralized. Thus, programs and data
will adaptively migrate and replicate in response to changing network
conditions, client access characteristics, and the importance of the information
requested. Mobile code will blur the traditional lines between servers
and clients, enabling programs to run at optimal network locations and
data to dynamically flow to where it is required.
Our goals for evolving the system in this direction include:
- Efficient utilization of wide-area resources
- Near-optimal end-to-end response times
- Continuous system availability
To achieve the above goals, a number of fundamental research issues must be
addressed, such as resource allocation, load balancing, adaptive algorithms,
system security, and data consistency. The ISSG is currently investigating
the following topics:
- WITNESS:
ensures probabilistic quorum intersection without requiring a majority of
votes, and thus significantly improves the availability of p2p systems.
- Service Utilities: we are interested in building self-organizing service
utilities that adapt to changing client and network characteristics.
- Modelnet: an emulation of the wide area
internet, used to develop and analyze large scale distributed systems.
- TACT: allows replicated
Internet services to dynamically trade data consistency for system
availability and performance.
- Slice: explores techniques for building unified massive-data storage systems from inexpensive components connected by a high-speed network.
- Peer-to-Peer
Search: uses Bloom filters, caching, and incremental results to
provide efficient peer-to-peer searching using a distributed inverted
index.
- Ivory: automatic state management for replicated Internet services.
Past Efforts
- Active Names: programmable location and transport of wide-area resources.
- Content Distribution: design and implementation of techniques for
dynamically replicating/migrating Internet content in response to user
access patterns.
- Quality-Aware
Transcoding: allows Internet services to dynamically adapt their web
content to current client, network, and service characteristics by
intelligently trading content fidelity for consumed network and CPU
resources.
- Epidemic Routing
An ns-2 simulation of a wireless routing system that uses
an epidemic algorithm to flood the network.
Resources
The ISSG group has 200+ computers and 2+ terabytes of disk space to
support research projects. Department members can find out
more information on the Research Resources
page.
Funding
This research is supported in part by a number of sources:
- NSF CAREER award supporting Vahdat (CCR-9984328)
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowships supporting Braynard, Reynolds, and
Sprenkle
- NSF grants (ITR-0082912, EIA-9972879, and EIA-9870724)
- U.S. Department of Education GAAN fellowship
- North Carolina Network Initiative graduate fellowships
- Hewlett Packard Corporation
- IBM Corporation
- Intel Corporation
- Microsoft Corporation
- Network Appliance