[Colloquium] Tomorrow: Iamnitchi/Dissertation Defense/10-29-03

[Margaret Jaffey]

Just a reminder about Adriana Iamnitchi's dissertation defense tomorrow.
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		Department of Computer Science/The University of Chicago

				***  Dissertation Defense ***


Candidate:  Adriana Iamnitchi

Defense Date:  Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Time and Location:  2:30 p.m. in Ryerson 276

Thesis Title:  Resource Discovery in Large Resource-Sharing Environments

Abstract:
Opportunistic sharing of Internet-connected resources is a low cost
method for obtaining access to unprecedented-scale collections of
resources. An essential service in any resource-sharing environment is
resource discovery: given a description of the resources desired, a
resource discovery mechanism returns locations of resources
that match the description.

Two resource-sharing environments are particularly well
defined by applications, user communities, and deployments: Grid and
peer-to-peer systems. Grids are sharing environments that rely on
persistent, standards-based service infrastructures that allow
well-established, mainly professional communities to share computers,
storage space, sensors, software applications, and data across
organizational boundaries. Peer-to-peer systems are Internet
applications that harness resources from millions of autonomous
participants. Thus, Grids provide infrastructure to support a variety of
applications on resources shared by relatively small communities; at the
scale of the peer-to-peer communities, remarkable sharing patterns are
exhibited, such as free riding and intermittent resource participation.

The focus of this dissertation is on solution design for resource
discovery in Grids of the scale and lack of reliability of
today's peer-to-peer networks. This hybrid target environment requires
fully decentralized solutions that scale with the number of users and
resources and tolerate intermittent resource participation.

To explore the solution space, we propose a taxonomy for resource
discovery solutions. This taxonomy proves to be a useful tool for
discussing and comparing existing solutions.

Using this taxonomy, we delimit and explore a portion of the solution
space. We build a scalable Grid emulator to evaluate mechanism
performance in this subspace. Large-scale experiments reveal that the
performance of mechanisms in this subspace is strongly dependent on
sharing characteristics.

For inspiration, we turned to studying  user behavior in various
communities. We uncovered a significant usage pattern in file-sharing
communities: users naturally form interest-based
groups. This pattern can be exploited for system design in a variety
of problems: we designed a file-location mechanism,
FLASK, that exploits and benefits from this naturally emerging
pattern. Trace-driven evaluations show FLASK leads to lower response
latency, good scalability, support for intermittent participation, and
satisfies requirements typical of scientific usage of data.

Candidate's Advisor:  Prof. Ian Foster

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A draft copy of Ms. Iamnitchi's dissertation is available in Ry 161A.
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Margaret P. Jaffey				margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 161A)		(773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago		http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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