Sean Rhea

OceanStore: an architecture for global-scale persistent storage

OceanStore is a utility infrastructure designed to span the globe and provide continuous access to persistent information. Since this infrastructure is comprised of untrusted servers, data is protected through redundancy and cryptographic techniques. To improve performance, data is allowed to be cached anywhere, anytime. Additionally, monitoring of usage patterns allows adaptation to regional outages and denial of service attacks; monitoring also enhances performance through pro-active movement of data. A prototype implementation is currently under development.

Tapestry: a resilient global-scale overlay for service deployment

We present Tapestry, a peer-to-peer overlay routing infrastructure offering efficient, scalable, location-independent routing of messages directly to nearby copies of an object or service using only localized resources. Tapestry supports a generic decentralized object location and routing applications programming interface using a self-repairing, soft-state-based routing layer. The paper presents the Tapestry architecture, algorithms, and implementation. It explores the behavior of a Tapestry deployment on PlanetLab, a global testbed of approximately 100 machines. Experimental results show that Tapestry exhibits stable behavior and performance as an overlay, despite the instability of the underlying network layers. Several widely distributed applications have been implemented on Tapestry, illustrating its utility as a deployment infrastructure.

Probabilistic location and routing

We propose probabilistic location to enhance the performance of existing peer-to-peer location mechanisms in the case where a replica for the queried data item exists close to the query source. We introduce the attenuated Bloom filter, a lossy distributed index data structure. We describe how to use these data structures for document location and how to maintain them despite document motion. We include a detailed performance study which indicates that our algorithm performs as desired, both finding closer replicas and finding them faster than deterministic algorithms alone.

Maintenance-free global data storage

Explores mechanisms for storage-level management in OceanStore, a global-scale distributed storage utility infrastructure, designed to scale to billions of users and exabytes of data. OceanStore automatically recovers from server and network failures, incorporates new resources and adjusts to usage patterns. It provides its storage platform through adaptation, fault tolerance and repair. The only role of human administrators in the system is to physically attach or remove server hardware. Of course, an open question is how to scale a research prototype in such a way to demonstrate the basic thesis of this article - that OceanStore is self-maintaining. The allure of connecting millions or billions of components together is the hope that aggregate systems can provide scalability and predictable behavior under a wide variety of failures. The OceanStore architecture is a step towards this goal.

Value-based web caching

Despite traditional web caching techniques, redundant data is often transferred over HTTP links. These redundant transfers result from both resource modification and aliasing. Resource modification causes the data represented by a single URI to change; often, in transferring the new data, some old data is retransmitted. Aliasing, in contrast, occurs when the same data is named by multiple URIs, often in the context of dynamic or advertising content. Traditional web caching techniques index data by its name and thus often fail to recognize and take advantage of aliasing.Despite traditional web caching techniques, redundant data is often transferred over HTTP links. These redundant transfers result from both resource modification and aliasing. Resource modification causes the data represented by a single URI to change; often, in transferring the new data, some old data is retransmitted. Aliasing, in contrast, occurs when the same data is named by multiple URIs, often in the context of dynamic or advertising content. Traditional web caching techniques index data by its name and thus often fail to recognize and take advantage of aliasing.

Spurring adoption of DHTs with openhash, a public DHT service

The past three years have seen intense research into Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs): both into algorithms for building them, and into applications built atop them. These applications have spanned a strikingly wide range, including file systems [1–3], event notification [4], content distribution [5], e-mail delivery [6], indirection services [7,8], web caches [9], and relational query processors [10]. While this set of applications is impressively diverse, the vast majority of application building is done by a small community of DHT researchers. If DHTs are to have a positive impact on the design of distributed applications used by real users outside this research community, we believe that the community of DHT-based application developers should be as broad as possible. Why, then, has this community of developers remained narrow? First, keeping a research prototype of a DHT running continually requires effort, and experience with DHT code. Second, significant testbed resources are required to deploy and test DHT-based applications. A hacker can download the code for Chord, but she cannot run that code alone; recall that only a tiny fraction of would-be developers has access to a testbed infrastructure like PlanetLab [11]. Consequently, most application developers would turn to ad hoc application-specific solutions rather than attempt to use a DHT.

Querying at Internet scale

We are developing a distributed query processor called PIER, which is designed to run on the scale of the entire Internet. PIER utilizes a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) as its communication substrate in order to achieve scalability, reliability, decentralized control, and load balancing. PIER enhances DHTs with declarative and algebraic query interfaces, and underneath those interfaces implements multihop, in-network versions of joins, aggregation, recursion, and query/result dissemination. PIER is currently being used for diverse applications, including network monitoring, keyword-based filesharing search, and network topology mapping. We will demonstrate PIERs functionality by showing system monitoring queries running on PlanetLab, a testbed of over 300 machines distributed across the globe.

A need for componentized transport protocols

There has been a steady stream of research over the years into componentized network protocols: protocol implementations assembled from a variety of building blocks. A promise of such frameworks has generally been flexibility: a protocol stack tailored for a particular application can be easily assembled, usually without writing any new code, by binding protocol objects together.