Seminarium: Systemy Rozproszone
14 i 15 marca 2008, godzina ???, sala ???
Martin van Steen

Gossiping in Distributed Systems

Distributed systems continue to face difficult scalability problems while expanding in number of components as well as the communication latencies between components. This has led to an increased interest in fully decentralized solutions in which nodes take decisions based on only locally available information. In particular, gossiping by which (meta-)information is disseminated or aggregated across the network forms an important technique to come to such decentralized solutions.

In this mini-course, we concentrate on (the role of) gossiping in distributed systems. Gossip-based solutions show a great deal of emergent behavior, and it is often unclear what the relationship is between a specific configuration of a gossiping protocol and its behavior. Likewise, we often see a difference between what theory would predict about a protocol, and what happens in practice, notably when concentrating on extra-functional behavior such as reliability, robustness, and reactions to changes in node membership.

The course will be roughly divided into two parts: foundations, in which theory and experimental findings are discussed; and applications, covering aggregation, structure management, and wireless systems.