Location Based Placement of Whole Distributed Systems

The high bandwidth and low latency of the modern internet has made possible the deployment of distributed computing platforms. The XenoServer platform provides a distributed computing platform open to all and presents three major new challenges for resource discovery: Firstly, network location is key for effectively provisioning services, to mitigate against high-latency, high-load or component failure. Secondly, many services require a presence on several servers, with inter-related requirements. Finally, as the platform is open with respect to users and servers, large numbers of queries and updates are expected. To address these requirements we introduce and evaluate Xeno-Search, a new distributed service for selecting the machines to host components of multi-node distributed systems and which is uniquely able to express and efficiently answer complex queries with interrelated location constraints. We demonstrate that Xeno-Search represents a trade-off between accuracy and query time which avoids exhaustive search and supports multiple resources. In addition the performance of the algorithm and the quality of its server selections is investigated and the performance of the distributed service shown to be invariant as the number of nodes or items indexed increases.