There are many variants of leader election algorithm in distributed networks. In this research, an agent based approach to leader election in distributed networks is investigated. Agents have shown to be useful in several ways. In the theoretical perspective, agents sometime help in reducing the message complexity of the system and sometimes help in lowering time complexity. In a more practical sense, agents perform operations independent of the processors, thereby lending a more flexible algorithm supporting different types of networks.

Durant la última dècada, la demanda d’emmagatzematge de dades ha anat creixent exponencialment any rere any. Apart de demanar més capacitat d’emmagatzematge, el usuaris actualment també demanen poder accedir a les seves dades des de qualsevol lloc i des de qualsevol dispositiu. Degut a aquests nous requeriments, els usuaris estan actualment movent les seves dades personals (correus electrònics, documents, fotografies, etc.) cap a serveis d’emmagatzematge en línia com ara Gmail, Facebook, Flickr o Dropbox. Malauradament, aquests serveis d’emmagatzematge en línia estan sostinguts per unes grans infraestructures informàtiques que poques empreses poden finançar. Per tal de reduir el costs d’aquestes grans infraestructures informàtiques, ha sorgit una nova onada de serveis d’emmagatzematge en línia que obtenen grans infraestructures d’emmagatzematge a base d’integrar els recursos petits centres de dades, o fins i tot a base d’integrar els recursos d’emmagatzematge del usuaris finals. No obstant això, els recursos que formen aquestes noves infraestructures d’emmagatzematge són molt heterogenis, cosa que planteja un repte per al dissenyadors d’aquests sistemes: Com es poden dissenyar sistemes d’emmagatzematge en línia, fiables i eficients, quan la infraestructura emprada és tan heterogènia? Aquesta tesis presenta un estudi dels principals problemes que sorgeixen quan un vol respondre a aquesta pregunta. A més proporciona diferents eines per tal d’optimitzar el disseny de sistemes d’emmagatzematge distribuïts i heterogenis. Les principals contribucions són: Primer, creem un marc d’anàlisis per estudiar els efectes de la redundància de dades en el cost dels sistemes d’emmagatzematge distribuïts. Donat un esquema de redundància específic, el marc d’anàlisis presentat permet predir el cost mitjà d’emmagatzematge i el cost mitjà de comunicació d’un sistema d’emmagatzematge implementat sobre qualsevol infraestructura informàtica distribuïda. Segon, analitzem els impactes que la redundància de dades té en la disponibilitat de les dades, i en els temps de recuperació. Donada una redundància, i donat un sistema d’emmagatzematge heterogeni, creem un grup d’algorismes per a determinar la disponibilitat de les dades esperada, i els temps de recuperació esperats. Tercer, dissenyem diferents polítiques d’assignació de dades per a diferents sistemes d’emmagatzematge. Diferenciem entre aquells escenaris on la totalitat de la infraestructura està administrada per una sola organització, i els escenaris on diferents parts auto administrades contribueixen els seus recursos. Els objectius de les nostres polítiques d’assignació de dades són: (i) minimitzar la redundància necessària, (ii) garantir la equitat entre totes les parts que participen al sistema, i (iii) incentivar a les parts perquè contribueixin els seus recursos al sistema. / Over the last decade, users’ storage demands have been growing exponentially year over year. Besides demanding more storage capacity and more data reliability, today users also demand the possibility to access their data from any location and from any device. These new needs encourage users to move their personal data (e.g., E-mails, documents, pictures, etc.) to online storage services such as Gmail, Facebook, Flickr or Dropbox. Unfortunately, these online storage services are built upon expensive large datacenters that only a few big enterprises can afford. To reduce the costs of these large datacenters, a new wave of online storage services has recently emerged integrating storage resources from different small datacenters, or even integrating user storage resources into the provider’s storage infrastructure. However, the storage resources that compose these new storage infrastructures are highly heterogeneous, which poses a challenging problem to storage systems designers: How to design reliable and efficient distributed storage systems over heterogeneous storage infrastructures? This thesis provides an analysis of the main problems that arise when one aims to answer this question. Besides that, this thesis provides different tools to optimize the design of heterogeneous distributed storage systems. The contribution of this thesis is threefold: First, we provide a novel framework to analyze the effects that data redundancy has on the storage and communication costs of distributed storage systems. Given a generic redundancy scheme, the presented framework can predict the average storage costs and the average communication costs of a storage system deployed over a specific storage infrastructure. Second, we analyze the impacts that data redundancy has on data availability and retrieval times. For a given redundancy and a heterogeneous storage infrastructure, we provide a set of algorithms that allow to determine the expected data availability and expected retrieval times. Third, we design different data assignment policies for different storage scenarios. We differentiate between scenarios where the entire storage infrastructure is managed by the same organization, and scenarios where different parties contribute their storage resources. The aims of our assignment policies are: (i) to minimize the required redundancy, (ii) to guarantee fairness among all parties, and (iii) to encourage different parties to contribute their local storage resources to the system.

Šiame darbe nagrinėjamos išskirstytos sistemos ir jų kūrimui naudojamos technologijos. Kadangi technologijų yra daug, o visas jas ištirti ir palyginti būtų labai sunku, todėl didžiausias dėmesys skiriamas Java RMI ir .Net Remoting – tai dvi populiarios išskirstytų objektų paradigmos šiuo metu naudojamos programų sistemų kūrimui Pagrindinis darbo tikslas yra išanalizuoti ir visapusiškai palyginti pasirinktas technologijas, didelį dėmesį skiriant jų veikimo greičiui. Darbas sudarytas iš keturių dalių. Pirmoje dalyje pateikiama bendra informacija apie išskirstytas sistemas, jų vystymąsi, architektūras, technologijų raidą ir t.t.. Antroje dalyje nagrinėjama Java RMI ir .Net Remoting veikimo principai, kuriais remiasi šios technologijos. Trečioje dalyje pateikiami šių dviejų technologijų veikimo principų panašumai ir skirtumai. Ir galiausiai siekiant išsiaiškinti Java RMI ar .Net Remoting realiomis sąlygomis veikia greičiau, ketvirtoje dalyje pateikiamas atlikto vykdymo greičio tyrimo aprašymas. Atlikti darbai leidžia teigti, kad Java RMI ir .Net Remoting idėjiškai yra panašios technologijos, bet skirtumų, įtakojančių veikimą, tarp jų irgi yra. Greičio tyrimo metu gauti rezultatai parodė, kad .Net Remoting beveik visais atvejais yra lėtesnė nei Java RMI. / Distributed systems and technologies used for this type of software are analyzed in this paper. Since there are a lot of technologies and it would be very difficult to explore and compare all of them, therefore this paper mainly focuses on Java and RMI. Net Remoting - two popular distributed objects paradigms currently used in distributed systems development. The first part provides general information about distributed systems, their development, architectures, technologies, and so on. The second part of the paper analyses the operating principles of Java RMI and. Net Remoting. The third section determines technological similarities and differencies. And finally, in order to clarify the fact Java RMI or. Net Remoting works faster in real terms, the fourth part provides the results of the implemented speed test. Although Java RMI and. Net Remoting are similar technologies, but the analysis showed that the there are quite a lot differences between them. The speed survey showed that. Net Remoting is slower than Java RMI in almost all cases.

Adaptive distributed systems have the potential to revolutionize how humans and computers interact. They can enable software to adapt to dynamic human demands, as users change their focuses, goals, locations and devices. However, producing these systems is currently very challenging: developers must solve daunting user interface issues while mired in distributed systems problems. We present a new class of toolkit, intended to ease the development of adaptive distributed systems. Unlike existing alternatives, we provide a high-level programming model in which developers can easily specify runtime adaptations. Meanwhile, our toolkit automatically generates a fast and tunable implementation. Partial failures in the distributed system are reflected back into the high-level programming model. As a result, developers can remain insulated in their high-level model while building highly-dynamic, high-performance and failure-resistant applications. Our Fiia.Net toolkit relies on model transformation at runtime to bridge between the programmer's high-level model and the actual implementation of the distributed system. Our novel model transformation is the first that can practically maintain this transformation, and enables our toolkit to easily support user-driven adaptations, dynamic optimization and self-healing. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2011-02-25 14:08:13.69

Multi-tenant cloud computing datacenters run diverse workloads, inside virtual machines (VMs), with time varying resource demands. Compute capacity multiplexing systems dynamically manage the placement of VMs on physical machines to ensure that their resource demands are always met while simultaneously optimizing on the total datacenter compute capacity being used. In essence, they give the cloud its fundamental property of being able to dynamically expand and contract resources required on-demand. At large scale datacenters though there are two practical realities that designers of compute capacity multiplexing systems need to deal with: (a) maintaining low operational overhead given variable cost of performing management operations necessary to allocate and multiplex resources, and (b) the prevalence of a large number and wide variety of faults in hardware, software and due to human error, that impair multiplexing efficiency. In this thesis we propound the notion that explicitly designing the methods and abstractions used in capacity multiplexing systems for this reality is critical to better achieve administrator and customer goals at large scales. To this end the thesis makes the following contributions: (i) CCM - a hierarchically organized compute capacity multiplexer that demonstrates that simple designs can be highly effective at multiplexing capacity with low overheads at large scales compared to complex alternatives, (ii) Xerxes - a distributed load generation framework for flexibly and reliably benchmarking compute capacity allocation and multiplexing systems, (iii) A speculative virtualized infrastructure management stack that dynamically replicates management operations on virtualized entities, and a compute capacity multiplexer for this environment, that together provide fault-scalable management performance for a broad class of commonly occurring faults in large scale datacenters. Our systems have been implemented in an industry-strength cloud infrastructure built on top of the VMware vSphere virtualization platform and the popular open source OpenStack cloud computing platform running ESXi and Xen hypervisors, respectively. Our experiments have been conducted in a 700 server datacenter using the Xerxes benchmark replaying trace data from production clusters, simulating parameterized scenarios like flash crowds, and also using a suite of representative cloud applications. Results from these scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our design techniques in real-life large scale environments.

Publish/Subscribe (in short pub/sub) allows clients that share common interest communicate in an asynchronous and loosely-coupled fashion. This paradigm is adopted by many distributed event-driven applications such as social networking services, distributed business processes and cyber-physical systems. These applications cannot afford to have the underlying pub/sub substrate perform unreliably, permanently fail or behave arbitrarily as it will cause significant disturbance to stably serving many end-users. Therefore, a research effort on making pub/sub systems resilient against various failures to sustain high quality of service to the clients is imperative. In this thesis, we focus on the overlay of pub/sub brokers that are widely adopted as a popular architecture for large-scale pub/sub systems. Broker overlays can suffer from various issues such as degradation of topology quality, brokers causing transient or permanent benign failures and Byzantine brokers behaving arbitrarily. We aim to make novel research contributions by exploring fundamental techniques that can help the broker overlays maintain functional and non-functional requirements even under the presence of the aforementioned failures and necessary administrative updates. We first build a set of overlay adaptation primitives that re-configure topologies such as shifting links and replicating brokers. These primitives are designed to involve a small local group of brokers in the pub/sub overlays so that the disruption during the execution of large-scale and dynamic changes can be controlled in a fined-grained manner. For the problem of degrading topology quality, automated planning systems are developed to find a sequence of adaptations that would cause minimal disruption to running services. Also, our primitives can be executed on demand to quickly fail-over a crashed broker or off-load congested brokers. In addition, these on-demand primitives can be used to form a group of dynamically replicated brokers that enforce a novel safety measure to prevent Byzantine brokers from sabotaging the pub/sub overlays. Our contributions are evaluated with systematic consideration of various trade-offs between functional and non-functional properties.

Publish/Subscribe (in short pub/sub) allows clients that share common interest communicate in an asynchronous and loosely-coupled fashion. This paradigm is adopted by many distributed event-driven applications such as social networking services, distributed business processes and cyber-physical systems. These applications cannot afford to have the underlying pub/sub substrate perform unreliably, permanently fail or behave arbitrarily as it will cause significant disturbance to stably serving many end-users. Therefore, a research effort on making pub/sub systems resilient against various failures to sustain high quality of service to the clients is imperative. In this thesis, we focus on the overlay of pub/sub brokers that are widely adopted as a popular architecture for large-scale pub/sub systems. Broker overlays can suffer from various issues such as degradation of topology quality, brokers causing transient or permanent benign failures and Byzantine brokers behaving arbitrarily. We aim to make novel research contributions by exploring fundamental techniques that can help the broker overlays maintain functional and non-functional requirements even under the presence of the aforementioned failures and necessary administrative updates. We first build a set of overlay adaptation primitives that re-configure topologies such as shifting links and replicating brokers. These primitives are designed to involve a small local group of brokers in the pub/sub overlays so that the disruption during the execution of large-scale and dynamic changes can be controlled in a fined-grained manner. For the problem of degrading topology quality, automated planning systems are developed to find a sequence of adaptations that would cause minimal disruption to running services. Also, our primitives can be executed on demand to quickly fail-over a crashed broker or off-load congested brokers. In addition, these on-demand primitives can be used to form a group of dynamically replicated brokers that enforce a novel safety measure to prevent Byzantine brokers from sabotaging the pub/sub overlays. Our contributions are evaluated with systematic consideration of various trade-offs between functional and non-functional properties.

abstract: Peer-to-peer systems are known to be vulnerable to the Sybil attack. The lack of a central authority allows a malicious user to create many fake identities (called Sybil nodes) pretending to be independent honest nodes. The goal of the malicious user is to influence the system on his/her behalf. In order to detect the Sybil nodes and prevent the attack, a reputation system is used for the nodes, built through observing its interactions with its peers. The construction makes every node a part of a distributed authority that keeps records on the reputation and behavior of the nodes. Records of interactions between nodes are broadcast by the interacting nodes and honest reporting proves to be a Nash Equilibrium for correct (non-Sybil) nodes. In this research is argued that in realistic communication schedule scenarios, simple graph-theoretic queries such as the computation of Strongly Connected Components and Densest Subgraphs, help in exposing those nodes most likely to be Sybil, which are then proved to be Sybil or not through a direct test executed by some peers. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Computer Science 2010

Este trabalho apresenta um modelo de integração de ferramentas de animação que reduz consideravelmente o esforço envolvido na construção de novos sistemas. O modelo proposto distribui as tarefas a serem implementadas pelo sistema entre diversas ferramentas, permitindo que cada uma seja menor e mais fácil de manter que um sistema completo. Uma implementação do modelo proposto também é apresentada aqui, assim como o é um protótipo de sistema, construído de acordo com o modelo. O protótipo é comparado com as ferramentas de animação atualmente disponíveis na UFRGS, a universidade na qual este estudo foi desenvolvido. O trabalho conclui com uma análise dos resultados principais obtidos deste estudo. Ao final também são apresentadas algumas sugestões de trabalhos futuros. / This work presents a model for animation tool’s integration, which greatly reduces the programmer’s work in developing a new system. The proposed model distributes all tasks among several tools, making each tool smaller and easier to maintain. An implementation of such model is also described here, and so is a prototype of an animation system made according to the model proposed. The prototype is then compared to the current animation tools available at the UFRGS, the University in which this work was developed. The work concludes with an analysis of the main results and some suggestions of possible future works.

Durante os últimos anos, a quantidade de dados gerada pelas aplicações cresceu consideravelmente. No entanto, para tornarem-se relevantes estes dados precisam ser processados. Para atender este objetivo, novos modelos de programação para processamento paralelo e distribuído foram propostos. Um exemplo é o modelo MapReduce, o qual foi proposto pela Google. Este modelo, no entanto, possui pontos de falha única (SPOF), os quais podem comprometer a sua execução. Assim, este trabalho apresenta uma nova arquitetura, inspirada pelo Chord, para lidar com os SPOFs do modelo. A avaliação da proposta foi realizada através de modelagem analítica e de testes experimentais. Os resultados mostram a viabilidade de usar a arquitetura proposta para executar o MapReduce. / During the last years, the amount of data generated by applications grew considerably. To become relevant, however, this data should be processed. With this goal, new programming models for parallel and distributed processing were proposed. An example is the MapReduce model, which was proposed by Google. This model, nevertheless, has Single Points of Failure (SPOF), which can compromise the execution of a job. Thus, this work presents a new architecture, inspired by Chord, to avoid the SPOFs on MapReduce. The evaluation was performed through an analytical model and an experimental setup. The results show the feasibility of using the proposed architecture to execute MapReduce jobs.