UWA Logo
  Faculty Home | School Home | Internal Page | Awesome Animations   
           
Home
About the School
Contact and People
Future Undergraduate Students
Prospective Postgraduates
Current Students
Current Postgraduates
Research
Research Areas Research Areas Research Areas
Research Seminars Research Seminars Research Seminars
20082008 2008 2008
20072007 2007 2007
20062006 2006 2006
20052005 2005 2005
20042004 2004 2004
20032003 2003 2003
20022002 2002 2002
20012001 2001 2001
20002000 2000 2000
19991999 1999 1999
19981998 1998 1998
School Research Conferences School Research Conferences School Conferences
Tech Reports Tech Reports Tech Reports
Distinguished Visitors Distinguished Visitors Distinguished Visitors
Research Opportunities for Students Research Opportunities for Students Research Opportunities ...
Research Project Suggestions Research Project Suggestions Research Project Sugges...
IT News
Awards
Industry Links and Prizes
School and IT Information
Other
Internal Information

Research Seminar - December 14, 2000

Seminar Announcement


Title: All Care and No Responsibility
An Approach to Distributed Systems
Speaker: Michael Oudshoorn
  Department of Computer Science
Adelaide University
Date: Thursday 14th December, 2000
Time: 9.00am
Venue: Seminar Room 1.24

Abstract

The effective distribution of an application across available resources has the potential to provide significant performance benefits. However, it is well known that effective distribution is difficult and there are many traps for novices. Despite these difficulties, the average programmer is interested in the benefits of distribution, provided that their program continues to execute correctly and with well defined failure semantics. Hence we say that the programmer is "all care". Nevertheless, the reality is that the average programmer does not want to be hampered with managing the distribution process. They are not interested in dealing with issues such as the allocation of tasks to processors, optimisation, latency, or process migration. Hence we say that the programmer is "no responsibility". This gives rise to the "all care and no responsibility" principle of distribution whereby the benefits of distributed systems is made available to the average programmer without burdening them with the mechanics behind the distributed system.

This talk will examine two aspects of an on-going project to provide automated support for the "all care and no responsibility" principle. The first part of the talk will focus on an adaptive system to allocate tasks to available processors. Given that different users of the same application may have vastly different usage patterns, it is difficult to determine a universally efficient distribution of the software tasks across the processors. An adaptive system called ATME is introduced that automatically allocates tasks to processors based on the past usage statistics of each individual user. The system evolves to a stable and efficient allocation scheme. The rate of evolution of the distribution scheme is determined by a collection of parameters that permits the user to fine-tune the system to suit their individual needs.

The second part of the talk examines distributed systems deployed on the worldwide scale where latency is the primary determinant of performance. The talk introduces Ambassadors, a communication technique using mobile Java objects in RPC/RMI-like communication structures. Ambassadors minimise the aggregate latency of sequences of inter-dependent remote operations by migration to the vicinity of the server to execute those operations. At the same time, Ambassadors migration takes place within an RPC/RMI-like structure, ensuring defined failure semantics, an important characteristic in distributed systems.

Top of Page