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

虽然我们越来越依赖联网的分布式系统，但当前的分布式系统需要大量的手动工作来部署，管理成本很高，而且往往很脆弱。这些问题的根本原因是当前的分布式系统缺乏原则性的设计，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，该技术基于新的分析和数值技术，用于在大规模分布式系统中优化或接近最佳地执行资源分配。我们正在开发新技术，以支持新一代高度可靠、自组织的基础设施服务。特别是，我们正在开发下一代域名服务，以取代无缝支持现有域名层次结构的域名服务，一个高性能的网络缓存，通过主动将热门数据项提供给客户端来实现可预测的高性能，以及一个永恒的软件存储库，它可以最大限度地减少蜂拥而至的BitTorrent式下载的下载时间。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，这些资源权衡目前是手动执行的或以特殊方式执行的。这些新技术直接适用于自组织对等系统，并带来了通过传统手段难以实现的性能、可管理性和可用性特性。将这些技术应用到基础设施服务的实施中，将产生比我们今天使用的更强大的服务替代方案，以替代脆弱和昂贵的服务，如域名系统、网络缓存和软件分发。

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.