Commodity distributed systems

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The creation of a distributed system is a major engineering exercise, often costing many millions of dollars to design, and several times more to operate.   Indeed, the total cost in North America just to keep existing computing systems functioning exceeds $40 billion annually.  In spite of this expense, computer systems are typically insecure and unreliable.   The single major cause of this problem is that the complexity of these systems exceeds the abilities of all but the very best of human experts.  Even the installation of a networked home computer often requires significant systems knowledge.  The evidence suggests that this complexity is inherent.  Over time this problem will get worse not better, as we build larger systems and inter-connect those systems.  The objective of our research is to address these hard problems of distributed-systems operation that currently require such deep knowledge to keep the system functioning correctly.  We plan to do so by having the systems self-manage.  In addition, we wish our systems to be based purely on commodity components, since we consider cost to be a major issue.  To then make the systems a commodity, we must limit ourselves to commodity hardware.  While computing systems today can use commodity hardware, the networks that interconnect them can be expensive to deploy and operate.  Thus we are adapting commodity wireless hardware to build cheap multi-hop wireless networks.Our end-vision is that a user will simply plug computer equipment into the necessary power outlet and it will self-configure and self-manage as required, in the same manner that other major systems, such as telephones, self-configure.  The significance of this research is that, if realized, it will enable users to focus on their tasks, rather than on the operation of the system.