We are looking at how to rebuild data centers in order to make them more efficient, cheaper and be more resilient to failure. We also want to build a platform on which it is easier to develop the distributed services that underpin external facing internet applications. To achieve this we are borrowing ideas from the fields of high performance computing, distributed systems and networking. The WREN workshop paper covers some of our intial thinking - but we have moved forwards considerably since this was written.
P. Costa, T. Zhan, A. Rowstron, G. O'Shea and S. Schubert.
"Why should we
integrate services, servers, and networking in a Data Center?"
Proceedings of WREN, August 2009.
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pdf ]
Virtual Ring Routing (VRR) is a new network routing protocol that occupies a unique point in the design space. VRR is a clean-slate design inspired by overlay routing algorithms in Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). Unlike DHTs, VRR is implemented directly on top of the link layer and does not rely on an underlying network routing protocol. VRR provides both traditional point-to-point network routing and DHT routing to the node closest to a key.
The VRR site (download VRR driver here).
M. Caesar, M. Castro, E. Nightingale, G. O'Shea and A. Rowstron, "Virtual Ring Routing: Network routing inspired by DHTs", Sigcomm 2006, Pisa, Italy, September 2006. [ pdf ]
Many applications, for example end-system monitoring, can generate large amounts of data - far too large to simply backhaul all the data to some central repository. Seaweed was an attempt to really try and provide a new "delay tolerant querying" approach to querying this data.
D. Naryanan, A.
Donnelly, R. Mortier, A. Rowstron. "Delay Aware Querying with
Seaweed" Proceedings of 32nd International Conference on Very
Large Data Bases (VLDB 2006), September 2006 (invited to the best
of VLDB'06)
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pdf ]