An approach to adaptive distributed systems Systems Group College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology

Project overview

An increasing number of distributed applications aim to provide services to users by interacting with a correspondingly growing set of data-intensive network services. Such applications, as well as the services they utilize, are generally expected to handle dynamically varying demand on resources and to run in large, heterogeneous, and dynamic environments, where the availability of resources cannot be guaranteed a priori - all of this while providing acceptable levels of performance.

To meet this challenge we propose a middleware approach that we call Active Streams. Actives Streams, and its associated framework, are intended to explore the idea of application-level distributed adaptation. Through Active Streams, users can dynamically build/extend applications and services by attaching location-independent functional units to the data streams flowing between their applications and network services. The C-based framework employs dynamic code generation in order to insure that these functional units can be executed efficiently, without the overheads of an interpreted language; and provides for fine-grain adaptation of their behavior through the association of read-only blocks of data whose content can be updated remotely in a push-type operation. Finally, these functional units can be dynamically re-deployed over the datapath in order to best leverage the available resources in the face of the dynamically changing environment and the stress of ever-changing application behavior.

People

• Fabian E. Bustamante
• Patrick M. Widener
• Dr. Karsten Schwan
• Dr. Greg Eisenhauer

• PDS, a Proactive Directory Service
• The ECho - Event Delivery System: An efficient and flexible event notification system that uses dynamic code generation
• The PBIO - Portable Binary Input/Output. A binary data meta-representation library.

• Fabian E. Bustamante, Greg Eisenhauer, Karsten Schwan and Patrick Widener. "Active Streams and the effects of stream specializaation". Poster in Proc. of Tenth International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-2001), San Francisco, California, August 7-9, 2001.
  Abstract | PostScript [119K] | PDF Format [34K] Poster (PowerPoint) [1053K]
• Greg Eisenhauer, Fabian E. Bustamante and Karsten Schwan. "Native Data Representation: An Efficient Wire Format for High Performance Computing". Tech. Report GIT-CC-01-18, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2001.
  A related version is under consideration by the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.
  Abstract | PostScript [332K] | PDF Format [418K]
• Fabian E. Bustamante, Greg Eisenhauer, Patrick Widener, Karsten Schwan, and Calton Pu. "Active Streams: An approach to adaptive distributed systems". Proc. 8th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-VIII), Elmau/Oberbayern, Germany, May, 2001.
  Abstract | PostScript [19K] | PDF Format [11K]
• Greg Eisenhauer, Fabian E. Bustamante and Karsten Schwan. "Event Services in High Performance Systems". To appear in Cluster Computing: The Journal of Networks, Software Tools, and Applications,, 2001. Invited submission of an extended version of our HPDC-2000 paper.
  Abstract | PostScript [138K] | PDF Format [153K]
• Greg Eisenhauer, Fabian E. Bustamante and Karsten Schwan. "A Middleware Toolkit for Client-Initiated Service Specialization". ACM SIGOPS, Volume 35, Number 2, pp. 7-20, April, 2001.
  Abstract | PostScript [219K] | PDF Format [108K]
• Fabian Bustamante, Greg Eisenhauer, Karsten Schwan, and Patrick Widener. "Efficient Wire Formats for High Performance Computing". Proc. of Supercomputing 2000 (SC 2000), Dallas, Texas, November 4-10, 2000.
  Abstract | PostScript [206K] | PDF Format [98K]
• Greg Eisenhauer, Fabian Bustamante and Karsten Schwan. "A Middleware Toolkit for Client-Initiated Service Specialization". Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2000) Middleware Symposium, July 18-20, 2000.
  Abstract | PostScript [219K] | PDF Format [108K]
• Greg Eisenhauer, Fabian Bustamante and Karsten Schwan. "Event Services for High Performance Computing". Proc. of Ninth International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-2000), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 1-4, 2000.
  Abstract | PostScript [138K] | PDF Format [153K]
• Fabian E. Bustamante and Karsten Schwan. "Active I/O Streams for Heterogeneous High Performance Computing". Parallel Computing (ParCo) 99, Delft, The Netherlands, 1999.
  Abstract | PostScript [89K] | PDF Format [139K]

Research projects and papers on topics related to Active Streams.