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


Web-based collaborative decentralized systems

We are currently witnessing two, seemingly diverging trends in distributed systems: one, in which fully decentralized peer-to-peer computing is deployed for exchanging information between end users, and another one in which we see centralization of Web services take place through very large data centers. In this mini-course, we consider where the two approaches meet, namely in Web-based (collaborative) decentralized systems, and content distribution networks in particular.

To meet scalability requirements, replication of Web content plays a crucial role in these systems. We first concentrate on the issues that need to be considered when applying replication techniques for the Web, followed by a presentation of various experiments that show that we need a myriad of (application dependent) solutions in order to actually build scalable systems. In doing so, it will uncover more fundamental problems for which no general solutions are yet known, but which need to be tackled in order to make any significant progress.

Martin van Steen, Vrije University, Amsterdam