[Colloquium] TODAY Monday, March 28, 2005 at 2:30 p.m. Praveen Yalagandula, Univ. of Texas

[Nita Yack]

Praveen Yalagandula

University of Texas

     Towards a General and Scalable Information Management Backplane for 
Large Networked Systems
     March 28, 2005, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
     Ryerson 251

Speaker's Homepage:

     http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~ypraveen

Abstract:

     In this talk, I will present my work on designing and developing a 
scalable distributed information management system (SDIMS) that 
aggregates and manages information in large networked systems and 
serves as a basic building block for a broad range of distributed 
applications. Distributed applications in large networked systems 
monitor and react to changes in both the information at individual 
nodes and reconfigurations in the whole system. Some examples of such 
applications are multicast, file location, system monitoring and 
management, publish-subscribe, domain name service, and resource 
discovery. These applications require a key component that gathers and 
manages information at individual nodes to provide sensible aggregated 
views of the global information. My research focuses on designing SDIMS 
as a general and scalable information backplane that eases the design, 
development, and deployment of these distributed applications.

     To be a basic building block, any information management system 
should have four properties: scalability to many nodes and attributes, 
flexibility to accommodate a broad range of applications, support 
administrative autonomy and isolation, and robustness to node failures 
and disconnections. I will describe the design of our system that (1) 
leverages techniques from Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) to create 
scalable aggregation trees, (2) provides flexibility through a simple 
API that lets applications control propagation of reads and writes, (3) 
provides autonomy and isolation through simple augmentations to current 
DHT algorithms, and (4) is robust to node and network reconfigurations 
through lazy reaggregation, on-demand reaggregation, and tunable 
spatial replication.

Nita Yack
Departmental Administrator
Computer Science Department
1100 E. 58th Street - Room 151
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-6019