Building an automated operating system for large-scale data centers hosting third party applications.
The BIG project looked at the problem of completely automating the deployment and operations of hosted applications in large-scale data centers. One grand challenge for BIG was to answer the question: "How do I take data center with 100,000 servers and turn it into a running instance of a internet-scale service like HotMail (and keep it running) without a human touching the servers or networking equipment?"
The BIG project started in Microsoft Research in late summer 2000 and moved to the Windows Server Division in fall 2001. Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative, the Dynamic Data Center, and the System Definition Model all came out of ideas started by the BIG project.
- Galen Hunt, Aamer Hydrie, Steven Levi, David Stutz, Bassam Tabbara, and Robert Welland, System and Method for Distributed Management of shared Computers, 29 July 2008
- Galen Hunt, Aamer Hydrie, Steven Levi, David Stutz, Bassam Tabbara, and Robert Welland, System and Method for Distributed Management of Shared Computers, 6 May 2008
- Galen Hunt and Jeff Simon, Filters to Isolate Untrusted Ports of Switches , 4 December 2007
- Galen Hunt and Jeff Simon, Establishing Computing Trust with a Staging Area, 4 December 2007
- Galen Hunt, Aamer Hydrie, Steven Levi, David Stutz, Bassam Tabbara, and Robert Welland, System and Method for Distributed Management of Shared Computers, 3 April 2007
- Mathilde Brown, Charlie Chase, Kevin Grealish, Galen Hunt, Aamer Hydrie, David Noble, Geoffrey Outhred, Glenn Peterson, Bassam Tabbara, Alexander Torone, and Robert Welland, Architecture for Distributed Computing System and Automated Design, deployment and Management of Distributed Applications, 3 April 2007
- Galen Hunt, Aamer Hydrie, Robert Welland, Bassam Tabbara, Steven Levi, and Jakob Rehof, System and Method for Designing a Logical Model of a Distributed Computer System and Deploying Physical Resources According to the Logical Model, 26 December 2006
- Galen Hunt, Stateless Distributed Computer Architecture with Server-Oriented State-Caching Objects Maintained on Network or Client, 24 October 2006
- Galen Hunt, Aamer Hydrie, Steven Levi, Bassam Tabbara, Mark VanAntwerp, and Robert Welland, System and Method Providing Automatic Policy Enforcement in a Multi-Computer Service Application, 22 August 2006
- Aamer Hydrie, Galen Hunt, Steven Levi, Bassam Tabbara, and Robert Welland, Using Packet Filters and Network Virtualization to Restrict Network Communications, 15 August 2006
