EIA-9870740 Levy, Henry M. Karlin, Anna R. University of Washington ESS: Distributed Resource Management in Local-Area and Wide-Area Networks Advances in network and processor technology are greatly changing the communication and computational power of networked computers. However, current software systems are unable to utilize the capabilities of modern hardware components, because they are designed for last-generation hardware. The goal of this research is to enable more effective use of future networks and processors through design and implementation of new software structures and algorithms better suited to the characteristics of future hardware. The research focuses on two related but independent domains. First, in local-area networks (clusters), this work seeks to improve the performance of applications through distributed, cluster-wide resource management. It will develop algorithms that permit the tight-knit sharing of all cluster-wide network resources: processors, network, memory, and disk storage. Second, this research seeks to apply experience in global resource management to a much broader domain -- the global Internet. The project will develop and test algorithms that optimally and dynamically locate both data and computation in the Internet, in order to improve data-access latencies and reduce network bandwidth utilization. A significant component of this research is the construction of a software simulation infrastructure to test hypotheses applied to such a large-scale system as the world-wide web.
