CAREER: Fluid Replication

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The performance of distributed information systems is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Past approaches to this problem either handle only a subset of root causes, or introduce new difficulties of their own. This project proposes fluid replication --- the automatic creation and placement of replicas in response to changing client demands and network capacities --- as a solution to this problem. These replicas are held on WayStations, which are infrastructural service nodes that can act as replica sites for both local and visiting users. The objective of this research is to construct four key mechanisms to enable fluid replication: an estimator for end-to-end network performance, a scalable scheme to locate WayStations, techniques for consistency management between WayStations and remote servers, and efficient client migration from one replica site to another. Prototypes of these mechanisms will be evaluated with standard workloads in both experimental and deployed networking testbeds. With these mechanisms, fluid replication promises to automatically match available resources to offered load. This reduces cost of administration, increases utilization of resources, and delivers improved performance to end-users.