John Colquhoun

Dynamically deploying Web services on a grid using Dynasoar

Dynasoar is an infrastructure for dynamically deploying Web services over a grid or the Internet. It enables an approach to grid computing in which distributed applications are built around services instead of jobs. Dynasoar automatically deploys a service on an available host if no existing deployments exist, or if performance requirements cannot be met by existing deployments. This is analogous to remote job scheduling, but offers the opportunity for improved performance as the cost of moving and deploying the service can be shared across the processing of many messages. A key feature of the architecture is that it makes a clear separation between Web service providers, who offer services to consumers, and host providers, who offer computational resources on which services can be deployed, and messages sent to them processed. Separating these two components and defining their interactions, opens up the opportunity for interesting new organisational/business models

Evaluating a Peer-to-Peer Database Server Based on BitTorrent

Database systems have traditionally used a Client-Server architecture. As the server becomes overloaded, clients experience an increase in query response time, and in the worst case the server may be unable to provide any service at all. In file-sharing, the problem of server overloading has been addressed by the use of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) techniques in which users (peers) supply files to each other, so sharing the load. This paper describes the Wigan P2P Database System, which was designed to investigate if P2P techniques for reducing server load, thus increasing system scalability, could be applied successfully in a database environment. It is based on the BitTorrent file-sharing approach. This paper introduces the Wigan system architecture, explaining how the BitTorrent approach must be modified for a P2P database server. It presents and analyses experimental results, including the TPC-H benchmark, which show that the approach can succeed in delivering scalability in particular cases.

A Peer-to-Peer Database Server

Database systems have traditionally used a Client-Server architecture. If the server becomes overloaded, clients will experience an increase in query response time, and in the worst case the server may be unable to provide any service at all. In the domain of file-sharing, the problem of server overloading has been successfully addressed by the use of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) techniques in which clients (peers) supply files --- or pieces of files --- to each other. This paper describes the Wigan P2P Database System, which was designed to investigate how P2P techniques for reducing server load and so increasing system scalability can be applied successfully in a database environment. Peers cache query results and use them to satisfy each others queries. Wigan is based on the popular BitTorrent file-sharing protocol.