This project explores employing distributed computational resources to combat the unreliability and highly variable performance inherent to wide-area systems. The goal of this work is to balance wide-area performance, security, and resource utilization by efficiently replicating and migrating computation using inexact information distributed across multiple administrative domains. To this end, this research addresses three areas important to scaling the global network infrastructure: i) dynamic placement and migration of computation for efficient utilization of global resources, ii) resource allocation among principals simultaneously utilizing resources in multiple administrative domains, and iii) a security infrastructure that enables the fine-grained transfer of rights for wide-area computation. The impact of this work will be increase fairness, scalability, and fault tolerance for distributed systems leveraging this infrastructure.
