CAREER: Building Robust, High-Performance Infrastructure Services Through Informed Resource Tradeoffs

虽然我们越来越依赖于网络化的分布式系统，但当前的分布式系统需要大量的人工部署，管理成本很高，而且往往很脆弱。这些问题从根本上源于当前分布式系统缺乏原则性设计，并且依赖于不可靠的启发式操作。我们正在研究构建健壮的、高性能的基础设施服务的新技术，基于在大规模分布式系统中实现最佳或接近最佳执行资源分配的新颖分析和数值技术。我们正在开发新技术，以实现新一代高度可靠、自组织的基础设施服务。特别是，我们正在开发下一代名称服务，以取代无缝支持现有名称层次结构的域名服务，一个高性能的web缓存，通过主动向客户提供热门数据项来实现可预测的高性能，以及一个永久的软件存储库，以最大限度地减少群集下载时间，bittorrent式下载。这项工作为有原则地理解分布式系统中的资源权衡奠定了基础，这些系统目前要么手动执行，要么以特别的方式执行。新技术可直接应用于自组织点对点系统，并带来难以通过传统手段实现的性能、可管理性和可用性。将这些技术应用于基础设施服务的实现将产生比我们今天使用的更强大的替代脆弱和昂贵的服务，如DNS、web缓存和软件分发。

While we are increasingly dependent on networked, distributed systems, current distributed systems require extensive manual effort to deploy, are expensive to administer, and tend to be fragile nevertheless. These problems stem fundamentally from the fact that current distributed systems lack principled design and depend on unreliable heuristics for their operation.We are investigating new techniques for building robust, high-performance infrastructure services, based on novel analytical and numerical techniques for optimally or near-optimally performing resource allocation in large-scale distributed systems. We are developing new techniques that enable a new generation of highly reliable, self-organizing infrastructure services. In particular, we are developing a next-generation name service to replace the Domain Name Service that seamlessly supports the existing name hierarchy, a high-performance web cache that achieves predictably high performance by delivering hot data items close to clients proactively, and an eternal software repository that minimizes download time for swarming, bittorrent-style downloads. This work lays a foundation for a principled understanding of resource tradeoffs in distributed systems that are currently performed either manually or in an ad hoc fashion. The new techniques are directly applicable to self-organizing peer-to-peer systems and lead to performance, manageability and availability properties that are difficult to achieve via conventional means. The application of these techniques to the implementation of infrastructure services will yield more robust replacements for fragile and expensive services, such as DNS, web caches, and software distribution than we use today.