Future Directions in Distributed Computing

This book presents a collection of 31 revised reviewed papers developed from contributions presented at the International Workshop on Future Directions in Distributed Computing, held in Bertinoro, Italy in June 2002. Also included are 7 particularly commissioned invited papers to round the coverage of relevant topics and four section surveys.

The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations of distributed systems, exploring next-generation communication infrastrucutures and applications, challenges in distributed information and data management, and challenges and opportunities in applications of distributed computing technologies. All in all, the book is a unique account and proposed agenda of issues to be addressed in future research in distributed computing.

Klappentext

Every year we witness acceleration in the availability, deployment, and use of distributed applications. However building increasingly sophisticated applications for extant and emerging networked systems continues to be challenging for several reasons: - Abstract models of computation used in distributed systems research often do not fully capture the limitations and the unpredictable nature of realistic distributed computing platforms; - Fault-tolerance and ef?ciency of computation are dif?cult to combine when the c- puting medium is subject to changes, asynchrony, and failures; - Middleware used for constructing distributed software does not provide services most suitable for sophisticated distributed applications; - Middleware services are speci?ed informally and without precise guarantees of e- ciency, fault-tolerance, scalability, and compositionality; - Speci?cation of distributed deployment of software systems is often left out of the development process; - Finally, there persists an organizational and cultural gap between engineering groups developing systems in a commercial enterprise, and research groups advancing the scienti?c state-of-the-art in academic and industrial settings. The objectives of this book are: (1) to serve as a motivation for de?ning future research programs in distributed computing, (2) to help identify areas where practitioners and engineers on the one hand and scientists and researchers on the other can improve the state of distributed computing through synergistic efforts, and (3) to motivate graduate students interested in entering the exciting research ?eld of distributed computing.

Inhalt

Practical Impact of Group Communication Theory.- On the Impact of Academic Distributed Systems Research on Industrial Practice.- Using Error-Correcting Codes to Solve Distributed Agreement Problems: A Future Direction in Distributed Computing?.- Lower Bounds for Asynchronous Consensus.- Designing Algorithms for Dependent Process Failures.- Comparing the Atomic Commitment and Consensus Problems.- Open Questions on Consensus Performance inWell-Behaved Runs.- Challenges in Evaluating Distributed Algorithms.- Towards Robust Optimistic Approaches.- Towards a Practical Approach to Confidential Byzantine Fault Tolerance.- Modeling Complexity in Secure Distributed Computing.- Communication and Data Sharing for Dynamic Distributed Systems.- Dissecting Distributed Computations.- Ordering vs Timeliness: Two Facets of Consistency?.- WAIF:Web of Asynchronous Information Filters.- The Importance of Aggregation.- Dynamic Lookup Networks.- The Surprising Power of Epidemic Communication.- Topology-Aware Routing in Structured Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks.- Uncertainty and Predictability: Can They Be Reconciled?.- Fuzzy Group Membership.- Toward Self-Organizing, Self-Repairing and Resilient Distributed Systems.- Dynamically Provisioning Distributed Systems to Meet Target Levels of Performance, Availability, and Data Quality.- Database Replication Based on Group Communication: Implementation Issues.- The Evolution of Publish/Subscribe Communication Systems.- Naming and Integrity: Self-Verifying Data in Peer-to-Peer Systems.- Spread Spectrum Storage with Mnemosyne.- Replication Strategies for Highly Available Peer-to-Peer Storage.- A Data-Centric Approach for Scalable State Machine Replication.- Scaling Optimistic Replication.- Building a Bridge between Distributed Systems Theory and Commercial Practice.- Holistic Operations in Large-Scale Sensor Network Systems: A Probabilistic Peer-to-Peer Approach.- Challenges in Making Pervasive Systems Dependable.- Towards Dependable Networks of Mobile Arbitrary Devices - Diagnosis and Scalability.- Technology Challenges for the Global Real-Time Enterprise.- Middleware for Supporting Inter-organizational Interactions.- Hosting of Libre Software Projects: A Distributed Peer-to-Peer Approach.- System Support for Pervasive Applications.- Technology Challenges for the Global Real-Time Enterprise.- Middleware for Supporting Inter-organizational Interactions.- Hosting of Libre Software Projects: A Distributed Peer-to-Peer Approach.- System Support for Pervasive Applications.