A computer service that runs at a single central location is more likely to become unavailable than a service distributed to many sites. There are two ways in which a service can be made to run at many sites: replication of the service, and distribution of the service. We are investigating ways in which to build distributed services i.e. services that have distinct components, at many different sites, that collaborate to ensure the quality of service. In Amaranth we are investigating real time adaptation for quality of service of a distributed system. In PASIS we are building a distributed secure storage system; managing the interplay between management of data, availability of the storage system, performance of the implementation, and security of the storage mechanism is a salient aspect of our work.
Projects:
The Amaranthproject will provide multi-dimensional, adaptive, assured Quality of Service (QoS) for heterogeneous distributed computing systems. In particular, Amaranth will enable systems to provide guarantees of QoS along multiple dimensions, with each dimension having several potential levels of potential assured service:
Project Contact: Pradeep K. Khosla
PASIS is an innovative framework for demonstrating perpetually available information systems that guarantee the survivability of information under malicious attacks or system component failures. PASIS is based on a novel architecture which breaks all information into "chunks" and distributes these "information chunks" in novel ways by using information replication and dispersal methods. This enables PASIS to not have any single point of failure (i.e., it is not possible to destroy the information in PASIS or to degrade the performance, by eliminating or capturing few selected components or information chunks within the system) and thereby achieve a very high degree of security and resiliency against failures and attacks.
Project Contact: Pradeep K. Khosla