| David C. DiNucci 2005-05-19, 5:46 pm |
| [Last modified 9/10/03. DCD]
comp.distributed Distributed Resource Sharing and Applications.
---------------------- CHARTER ---------------------
Although the name "comp.distributed" has been chosen due to its
familiarity and convenience, the discussion in this unmoderated
newsgroup is broader than just those topics traditionally
regarded as "distributed computing". Specifically, topics include
any unique issues relating to the creation and exploitation of
collectives of geographically distributed and potentially
heterogeneous resources such as computers, data/information sources,
peripherals, instruments, and humans. Appropriate areas of discussion
in this context include (but are not limited to):
* discovering, scheduling/brokering, and accessing remote resources
* exploitation of heterogeneous resources
* resource management, scheduling, and computational economy
* portable/adaptable communication substrates
* quality of service approaches
* portable program development tools, languages, techniques
* data management tools and techniques
* exploitation of distributed memory hierarchy
* decentralized security
* practical accounting, reimbursement, and business & revenue models
* overcoming impediments to wide-area connectivity
* cross-organizational policy issues and ways to address them
* mechanisms and policies for intellectual property
* programming tools, environments, and languages
* applications, collaboration, and distributed agents
* simulation and performance modelling
* comparisons of grid and p2p, and issues unique to each
* events, surveys, news and general announcements
It is expected that additional 3rd-level subgroups addressing some of
these topics or others may be created as dictated by the volume and
cohesiveness of resulting message traffic.
---------------------- DESCRIPTION ---------------------
Networks in general, and the internet specifically, have been
evolving, from star topologies of thin clients or dumb terminals
connected to central servers, to a collection of highly connected
nodes, many having significant compute, storage, and peripherals,
along with human presence. Likewise, internet tools and protocols
have evolved from being primarily a mechanism to "push" (via email)
or "pull" (via web-browser) untyped data, into supporting more
interactive, semantic, and bi-directional relationships. These
changes have prompted different communities to (re-)explore the
potential of sharing and exploiting collections of heterogeneous,
geographically distributed resources such as computers, data, people,
and scientific instruments in a secure and consistent manner, usually
lacking any central control or authority. These efforts are often
described with terms like "peer-to-peer" ("p2p") and "grids", and
can serve to virtualize enterprizes by blurring the significance of
physical location.
Different communities tend to focus on different varieties of
resources, different overall objectives and constraints, and different
degrees of permanence of the resource collectives. For example,
"grid" communities will often consider large, semi-permanent (though
dynamically constituted) collections of world-class resources that can
be accessed much as utilities, to provide unprecedented capabilities
that enable, for example, large-scale problems in science, engineer-
ing, and commerce. "p2p" communities, on the other hand, often seek
on-demand temporary relationships between everyday personal computers,
devices, and peripherals "at the edge of the network", that help to
solve every-day problems of sharing, collaboration, and computing in
more efficient, convenient, and economical ways. Similar relation-
ships have been explored over time in areas related to human collabor-
ation, distributed data bases, distributed search, parallel and
distributed computing, web services, and hierarchical content delivery
networks.
In spite of these differences, all of these communities share a large
number of challenges as a direct result of attempting to effectively
and synergistically assemble and use these collectives of hetero-
geneous distributed resources. These challenges include:
* Lack of any central authority, leading to the potential unannounced
availability or withdrawal of resources, requiring fault tolerant
applications and complicating the discovery and scheduling of
resources.
* Heterogeneous resources, requiring methods to recognize and request
unique functionality when needed, while hiding unexploitable
resource differences behind consistent interfaces.
* Heterogeneous performance in those resources, prompting the use of
simulation and performance modeling to determine which resources to
use when.
* Heterogeneous requirements from both resource owners and end users
in terms of their objectives, quality of services, and computa-
tional economy.
* Unpredictable and dynamic network topology and properties,
requiring the ability to portably deal with differing latency and
bandwidth constraints (e.g. hiding latency while minimizing
overhead) and motivating quality of service (QoS) mechanisms.
* A complex and unpredictable concurrent environment, requiring
general approaches to program development that hide these features
while leveraging existing tools, languages, and techniques wherever
possible.
* A memory hierarchy that can extend to the memory and disk throughout
the collective, prompting a reconsideration of traditional data
storage and caching approaches.
* The potential presence of untrusted resources and/or actors,
requiring decentralized approaches to privacy, authorization,
authentication, anonymity, and the determination of levels of
acceptable risk associated with different operational modes.
* Achieving return on investment for both resource users and
providers, requiring approaches for auditable accounting and re-
imbursement as well as the consideration of cost/price as a resource
selection parameter.
* Impediments to connectivity, including firewalls and oversubscribed
scarce network resources (such as dial-in modems, and IP addresses
shared through network address translation/IP masquerading).
* Cross-organizational IT involvement, requiring flexible and
politically acceptable policies, procedures, and management tools.
* Evaluating and proposing mechanisms and policies for the protection
of intellectual property in an environment explicitly designed to
facilitate instant sharing.
* Understanding and exploiting the potential value of these resource
collectives, including effective collaboration strategies,
integration of mixed resource types into problem solving
environments, novel application areas and solution approaches
enabled by this environment, and the use of automated agents.
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