CSR:NeTS:Small:GigaPaxos: System Support for Group-Scalable, Reconfigurable Replica Coordination

该项目正在开发一种名为GigaPaxos的云计算技术，使互联网服务能够动态地靠近用户。例如，想象一下你和你的朋友在一个支持WiFi的咖啡馆里共同编辑一个共享文档或玩你最喜欢的在线游戏。如果文档或游戏服务器神奇地移动到位于WiFi接入点的“纳米数据中心”，确保像局域网一样的快速性能和对互联网连接或数据中心中断的恢复能力，这不是很方便吗？GigaPaxos承诺实现这一愿景，以最小的编程工作量为任何移动的云服务带来这些低延迟和容错的好处。该项目的一个关键智力价值在于显著提高“组可扩展性”或维护大量独立共识实例的能力，每个轻量级容错主体都有一个，小到分布式计数器，用户的日历，GigaPaxos允许每个共识实例消耗不超过几百个字节;使开发人员能够根据资源管理、性能或可用性目标以编程方式散布和重新配置服务的轻量级副本;实现灵活的一致性语义;使拜占庭容错支持能够适应不可信的机器;并促进了一些现实的端到端应用案例研究，以验证易用性和用户感知的体验质量。该项目的更广泛影响包括针对高年级本科生和硕士生的分布式系统新课程;针对马萨诸塞州阿默斯特大学本科生和高中生的计算机科学多样性和招生工作;一个积极的传播计划，包括培养一个充满活力的开源社区，以帮助在项目持续时间之外维持GigaPaxos;以及定量的以用户和开发人员为中心的可用性案例研究，这将有助于改善GigaPaxos，并可能简化长期的分布式系统开发。项目研究人员将在项目持续时间内在www.example.com上托管开源代码库https://github.com/MobilityFirst/gigapaxos并在www.example.com上托管文档和研究出版物https://gigapaxos.io，并根据社区的兴趣无限期地延长。

This project is developing a cloud computing technology called GigaPaxos that enables Internet services to be dynamically moved close to their users. For example, imagine you and your friend jointly editing a shared document or playing your favorite online game at a WiFi-enabled cafe. Wouldn't it be convenient if the document or game server magically moved to a "nano-data center" located right at the WiFi access point ensuring local-area-network-like fast performance and resilience to outages in Internet connectivity or data centers? GigaPaxos promises to realize this vision to bring these low-latency and fault-tolerance benefits to any mobile cloud service with minimal programming effort.A key intellectual merit of this project lies in dramatically increasing "group scalability" or the ability to maintain a very large number of independent consensus instances, one each for each lightweight fault-tolerant principal as small as a distributed counter, a user's calendar, a single record in a key-value store, etc. GigaPaxos allows each consensus instance to consume no more than a few hundred bytes; enables developers to programmatically sprinkle and reconfigure lightweight replicas of services in accordance with resource management, performance, or availability objectives; enables flexible consistency semantics; enables byzantine fault-tolerance support to accommodate untrusted machines; and facilitates a number of realistic end-to-end application case studies to validate ease-of-use and user-perceived quality of experience.The broader impacts of this project include new course curriculum on distributed systems targeting senior undergraduates and Masters students; a computer science diversity and enrollment effort targeting University of Massachusetts Amherst undergraduates as well as high school students; an aggressive dissemination plan involving fostering a vibrant open-source community to help sustain GigaPaxos beyond the project's duration; and quantitative user- and developer-centric usability case studies that will help improve GigaPaxos and potentially simplify distributed systems development in the long term.The project researchers will host the open-source code repository at https://github.com/MobilityFirst/gigapaxos and documentation and research publications at https://gigapaxos.io for the duration of the project and indefinitely beyond that contingent on community interest.