CSR: NeTS: Medium: Achieving High-Availability in the Face of Rapid Network Evolution in Large Content Providers

全球互联网服务，如网络搜索、社交网络、视频传播和云计算，都是建立在数据中心上的，这些数据中心是装满计算机的大型仓库。数据中心的计算机通过网络连接在一起并连接到互联网。如果网络瘫痪，那么它所连接的计算机和它们所支持的互联网服务也会瘫痪。该项目旨在将这些网络每月的停机时间减少一到两个数量级。该项目将探索两个组件的设计，这两个组件可以大大减少网络停机时间。 一个组件将是新的高可用性控制平面，其将包括新的复制协议，该复制协议对外部故障检测器的故障提供强一致性和弹性，同时保留当前较不可用的设计的许多期望属性（例如，尽可能地减少资源占用。另一个组成部分将是自动化管理平面，它将提高指定网络上的管理操作（MOp）的抽象水平，从而允许自动化软件综合和管理实现复杂网络MOp所需的步骤序列，例如在大型网络上升级软件。全球互联网服务是现代生活的一个组成部分，提高其可用性将使社会受益。项目计划包括开发软件原型和与大型互联网服务密切合作，以增加技术转让的可能性。 该项目的研究将由研究生和本科生进行，他们将学习网络如何工作，如何建立和改进它们，以及如何建立和改进控制它们的计算机系统。 这些技能中的每一项都可能在未来几年变得越来越重要。

Global Internet services, such as web search, social networking, video dissemination, and cloud computing are built on data centers that are large warehouses full of computers. The computers in the data centers are connected together, and to the Internet, by a network. If that network goes down then the computers it connects and the Internet services they support also go down. This project aims to decrease, by one to two orders of magnitude, how long those networks are down each month.The project will explore the design of two components that can contribute significantly towards decreasing network downtime. One component will be a new highly-available control plane that will include a new replication protocol that provides strong consistency and resilience to the failure of an external failure detector while retaining as many of the desirable properties of current less-available designs (e.g., small resource footprint) as possible. The other component will be an automated management plane that will raise the level of abstraction of specifying a management operation (MOp) on the network, thereby allowing automated software to synthesize and manage the sequence of steps necessary to achieve a complex network MOp such as upgrading software on a large network.Global Internet services are an integral part of modern life and increasing their availability will benefit society. The project plans include developing software prototypes and working closely with large Internet services to increase the likelihood of technology transfer. The research in the project will be conducted by graduate students and undergraduate students that will learn how networks work, how to build and improve them, and how to build and improve the computer systems that control them. Each of these skills is likely to be increasingly important in the coming years.