Research and development in cloud-based distributed systems is currently hindered due to the incredible difficulty of running such systems at scale. The Wisconsin Pocket Datacenter (PoD) project directly addresses this dilemma by enabling researchers and developers to run large-scale distributed systems on modest hardware resources. The key novel idea behind PoD is data elision, which removes actual application data from the underlying disks, memories, and network transfers of the distributed system under test. PoD thus enables many virtual instances of such a system to be run upon just a few physical machines, thus making testing, debugging, and in general development simpler, faster, and less resource-intensive.
Cloud-based distributed systems represent a critically-important piece of modern computing infrastructure. As users and corporations migrate their data and computation into such facilities, it is increasingly important to ensure that such systems operate correctly and efficiently. PoD enables developers to debug existing systems and test new designs without excessive hardware resources; with such a tool in their workbench, system developers will be able to more readily build and test the next generation of cloud-based systems to support the needs of a growing percentage of society.
